Russia’s Shortage of Nurses Seen Growing from 50,000 Now to 250,000 in Four Years

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 11 – Russia now has a shortage of 50 to 70,000 nurses, a figure that risks growing to as much as 250,000 in only four years, the result of low pay, bad working conditions, and the aging of current nurses, who now mostly are over 40, according to Yan Vlassov, the head of the All-Russian Union of Patients.

            The Putin regime’s response has been to call for expanding the enrollment and nursing institutions, but such a step, Vlassov says, won’t quickly or well. The government must address salaries and working conditions as well. Otherwise disaster looms (mk.ru/social/2026/05/11/k-2030-godu-nekhvatka-srednego-medpersonala-v-rossii-mozhet-uvelichitsya-do-250-tys-chelovek.html).

            The problems the situation of nurses in Russia and the response of the Putin regime to them resemble those in many parts of the Russian economy: a failure to appreciate why people are leaving certain jobs and the conviction of the authorities that simply adding more entrants to work in particular areas will suffice to solve the problem.

            In reality, however many students are trained to do certain jobs, many of them will leave the profession quickly and thus undercut efforts to fill existing gaps – a special case of the more general Russian predisposition to assume that extensive approaches will always work and that intensive ones are not necessary.