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. An easy way to read that would be as a shortage of people. Yet, that ignores the full picture.

We know there are plenty of Vermonters who would do critical work in healthcare, and would do it well. What stops them isn't desire, or competence. What's stops them is having a way in.

Vermont needs about 1,200 new registered nurses a year, yet it graduates around 400, leaving us 800 workers short. Most of the other critical roles have only one local training program available, if that.

The in-state path to this career is stacked against learners. Vermont’s only homegrown route to an RN runs three years and 84 credits, which means it costs roughly 160% more than a comparable associate degree. Why pay 160% more if you could drive over the border to New Hampshire to get trained somewhere faster and cheaper? It's an easy call, and structurally contributes to brain drain in Vermont.

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 good news is that there is a shortage of willing learners. Instead, there's a bottleneck built into how they get trained.

We know this is a loaded, tangled problem, the kind that usually takes years just to define. We took it on in a collaboration between Gametheory, Vermont Healthcare Collaborative, and 65 leaders from 25 healthcare organizations across the state. In a rapid 3-hour session, we brought these experts together to dig deep and find solutions.

In that short time, they generated over 130 ideas of how to solve this seemingly impossible problem. The alignment and energy fueled the months of work that followed for our team: sitting with the 130-plus ideas, tracing the threads that kept recurring, and trying to name the underlying solution everyone had been pointing us to.

So how do we solve this? It turns out that the people who feel the shortage most were the ones who could fix it. Employers showed us that in lieu of traditional university training, there's a path where employers sponsor the education themselves.

The learners that are here in the state are not learners looking for a traditional full-time college experience. They're hospital employees with families, in nearby roles hoping to move up. By putting employers in the mix as an education conduit, they could help design learning programs that meet the flexibility, cost, and accessibility needs of learners.

Employers committed to finding learning institutions to partner with. Institutions that teach online, and on weekends and evenings so working adults keep their jobs. We also realized that by working across healthcare institutions, labs and clinical hours could run regionally so no one has to relocate to finish out their license. Employers can cover the cost, especially as online programs have lower rates and just the core, most essential credits. Beyond that, we heard that learners will thrive with paid study time, 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. In fact, there's enough appetite that this change has already started. Since the summit a year ago, multiple education pilots have launched in close partnership with Vermont employers. The hope is that as these initial cohorts graduate and the impact is proven, these pilots will scale to meet the learning demand across the state.

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.

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.