Attention all new nursing grads and other health care job-seekers: Today in the NYT there is a fascinating interactive feature “How the Recession Reshaped the Economy, in 255 Charts” by Alicia Parlapiano and Jeremy Ashkenas. It helps illustrate where the health care jobs are in our country, what the average salaries are within different sectors of the health care system, and what the trends are in terms of growth (or decline) of the different sectors.
Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the authors illustrate in easy-to-read charts how the number of jobs have changed for a particular industry over the past decade. These data are only available for private industries, so for health care, public health jobs are (unfortunately) not included. The only middle-wage private industries that did not lose jobs during the recession were those within health care.
One of the charts is titled The Medical Economy and here is what stands out to me:
- Health care industries that were relatively unaffected by the recession and that have shown steady growth include home health care services, outpatient care centers (both general outpatient care and ones specific to mental health), and physician’s offices.
- Health screening programs (including blood and organ banks) have recovered and grown.
- Psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals have recovered and grown.
- General medical-surgical hospitals remained relatively unaffected by the recession but appear to be mostly flat in terms of growth.
- Specialty hospitals (excluding psychiatric and substance abuse) have recovered and grown, but they have shown a substantial decline in jobs since March 2012 (with a small blip back up over the past few months). I would imagine these changes for specialty care hospitals are correlated with the roll-out of ACA, especially changes to Medicare reimbursement for hospital care.
Take home lesson for people in the job-search mode within health care: Follow the money and look for jobs in the economically healthier parts of the U.S. health care system. Don’t rely on hospitals as the only places for job-searching.
Take home lesson for those of us in the role of nursing (or other health care professions) education: These ‘hard’ economic data provide even more good reasons to recruit and prepare students for work in primary care, community-based, non-acute care settings.
JOSEPHINE ENSIGN 