Behind the Report

The fix for Vermont’s healthcare shortage could be simpler than it looks

Vermont’s healthcare system is stretched thin, with worker shortages, rising patient needs, and an aging population pressing on every organization in the state. The easy way to read that is as a shortage of people. It is not.

There are plenty of Vermonters who would do this work, and do it well. What stops them is the way in. Vermont needs about 1,200 new registered nurses a year and graduates around 400, a gap of 800, and most of the other high-demand roles have one local training program, or none. The in-state path that does exist is stacked against the learner. Vermont’s only homegrown route to an RN runs three years and 84 credits, makes you earn an LPN license first, and costs roughly 160% more than a comparable associate degree across the border. Faced with that, people leave to get trained somewhere faster and cheaper, and many do not come back. The shortage is not a shortage of willing people. It is a bottleneck built into how they get trained.

Fig. 1.  Healthcare leaders at the Workforce Summit, Rutland, October 2025.

Vermont has people in every community who would thrive in healthcare jobs if given the chance.

— Jerry Baake, UVM Health

The hopeful part is how fixable this is, and that the people who feel the shortage most are the ones who can fix it. Employers can sponsor the education themselves, and many already want to. Make it flexible, with coursework online and in the evenings so working adults keep their jobs. Make it local, with labs and clinical hours run regionally so no one has to move to earn a license. Make it affordable, with the employer covering the cost, paid time to study, and loan repayment for the people who stay. Build it as an apprenticeship, where you earn while you learn. An employer-led program can do all of this at once. The appetite is there: at the summit, 80% of employers said they would host clinical training, and half could sponsor an apprenticeship outright. The first of these more flexible, more affordable pilots are already getting underway.

None of this has to rest on employers alone. Ideally, Vermont’s colleges and training programs would meet the demand head-on, and the invitation is open for them to. For now, though, the employers are the ones stepping up, because the people they need cannot wait.

The summit itself was striking. This is a loaded, tangled problem, the kind that usually takes years just to define. In a single half-day, 65 leaders from 25 organizations, out of more than 80 invited statewide, generated over 130 ideas, and teams that never compared notes kept reaching the same conclusions. Every one of them had already seen the problem from the inside. That convergence did not happen by chance; we designed the session and the toolkit so the people who live the problem could get straight to solutions.

That day was the fuel. The alignment and energy of the half-day powered the months of work that followed: sitting with the 130-plus ideas, tracing the threads that kept recurring, and giving a clear voice to the resonance we had felt in the room. The summit made the agreement visible. The work after turned it into something we could act on. This report is part of that, but the pilots now getting underway are the real result.

01  ·  What happens next

Two recommendations carry it forward. The first, employer-sponsored education pilots, is the apprenticeship model those first programs are already testing: shared cohorts, regional clinicals, and costs an employer can stand behind. The second is a Healthcare Workforce Center, a single place to help Vermonters find a path into these careers and stay on it. Nearly every other state already has one. Vermont does not, yet, though it is closer than it was a year ago.

Read the full report, and tell us what you think. We hope it helps more Vermonters find their way into this work, without leaving home to do it.