Happy Memorial Day! Before we close out the month, we want to recognize that May is National Nurses Month! We here at 33N think this is a great time to honor and celebrate the incredible contributions of nurses to the healthcare industry. Today, we want to shine a spotlight on an interactive dashboard built by Nikolai Elneser at Neighborhood Nexus for the Georgia Center for Nursing Excellence. This tool offers valuable insights into nursing workforce metrics throughout the state of Georgia, and is being revised at intervals with updated data .
We highlight a few findings below, but you can find a link to the full dashboard here.
Wages
The first feature of the dashboard we want to highlight is the section on wages. The chart below shows the disparity in wages, depending on experience, for all nurse categories tracked, Registered Nurses (RN), Licensed Practical Nurses (LPN)/Licensed Vocational Nurses (LVN), the combined nurse categories tracked, and all occupations.
The data show, as of 2020, the that median wage among all nurses (near $60,000) was well above the median wage among all occupations (less than $40,000). Wages for the RN are highest among all experience levels of the nursing profession categories shown.
Demographics
The demographics of the statewide nursing workforce are visualized below in a series of charts which slice the data by race, ethnicity, age, education, and gender:
Statewide, nursing positions predominately filled by Black and White workers, with 51% of LPN/LVNs being Black, while 56% of all nurses and 59& of RNs are White. Ethnically, over 90% of all 3 categories are non-Hispanic and are evenly distributed between the age groups of 25-34, 35-44, and 45-54, with around 25% in each age category. Finally, the profession is very female-dominated, with 88% of all nurses being female, 91% of LPN/LVNs being female, and 87% of RNs being female.
Job Postings
While the first 2 tabs (pages) of the dashboard focus on the supply and demand for nursing professions across the state, the third page of the dashboard tracks job postings for LPN and RN jobs across the Metro Atlanta area and the other 5 statewide county-based subregions of Central, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, and Southwest Georgia. The data go back to Q1 2010, but we have filtered this range to only show postings from the previous 3 years:
The Metro Atlanta region (light green) features by far the most postings compared to other regions around the state. Postings for the Metro region peaked in Q1 2021, with the vast need generated b y COVID-19, and have not risen back to these levels just yet. However, job postings in the Central and Northeast regions are on the rise and, as of Q4 2022, have posted their highest number of jobs since the start of 2019.
These findings highlight only a few components of the Interactive Nursing Workforce Dashboard. Follow the link above (or here) to explore the dashboard on your own!