Posted

John Commins, for HealthLeaders Media, July 9, 2012
 

The healthcare industry created 13,000 jobs in June, a significant drop from the sector’s 33,300 new jobs in May. The overall unemployment rate, however, remained unchanged at 8.2%.

Nevertheless, Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday shows that healthcare created 169,800 jobs in the first half of 2012, which represent 18.7% of the 902,000 jobs created in the overall economy so far this year. Healthcare created 141,300 new jobs in the first half of 2011.

June Shelp, a lead author of theThe Conference Board Help Wanted OnLine monthly report, says she is seeing lots of “churn” among skilled clinicians in the healthcare labor market.

“The reason you see so many advertised vacancies for healthcare is that it is a fairly scarce commodity,” Shelp says. “There aren’t as many nurses and doctors as we’d like and they are much more prone to move and change when the opportunity is there, opening up grounds for other people.”

That churn, Shelp says, suggests that there is growing confidence—at least among skilled healthcare workers—in their career prospects as the economy stumbles along.

“That tends to mean more people are looking for a job. They’re willing to quit where they are and try something new. That is all somewhat positive. The net result is a lot of additional new hires,” she says.

And even though skilled healthcare workers remain in high demand, Shelp says there is evidence that hospitals, physicians’ offices and other healthcare employers are ready to replace low-performing or malcontent workers. “They are willing to get rid of the person who is not right,” she says.

BLS data shows ambulatory services, which include physicians’ offices, led healthcare with 4,800 new jobs in June. Nursing homes created 4,500 jobs and hospitals created 3,700 jobs.  BLS data from May and June are preliminary and may be revised considerably in the coming months.

Shelp says “demand for nurses more or less has been in the same ballpark since 2005,” when the HWOL data series began. “We’re talking just under 250,000 ads a month that are looking for nurses, new ads and reposted ads,” she says. “Because the number of people who are qualified for nursing jobs hasn’t changed, we see what is beginning to grow is the demand for nursing assistants and a big increase in the need for healthcare support functions.”

“I look at physical therapist, for example. That demand has gone up. Occupational therapists have definitely gone up. Physicians’ assistants clearly have gone up,” Shelp says. “When you can’t find the right person, then you begin to change what it is exactly that you need.”

In the larger economy, nonfarm payroll employment rose by 80,000 in June, led by modest job growth in professional and business services, temporary help services, and management and consulting services. Job growth in the overall economy has fallen steeply in the last four months after averaging 252,000 new jobs in both January and February, BLS reports.  

Halfway through 2012, healthcare job growth is slightly ahead of the pace set in 2011, when healthcare created 296,900 jobs and accounted for more than 18% of the 1.6 million new jobs in the overall economy.

More than 14.3 million people worked in the healthcare sector in June, with more than 4.8 million of those jobs at hospitals and more than 6.3 million jobs in ambulatory services, which includes more than 2.4 million jobs in physicians’ offices.

In the larger economy, BLS said 12.7 million people were unemployed in June, which was essentially unchanged from May. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as those who have been jobless for 27 weeks or longer, remained at 5.4 million people in June, representing 41.9% of the unemployed.   

There’s debate on whether or not that growth in the healthcare sector is healthy for the rest of the economy. Healthcare and education occupy an odd place in the overall economy as two sectors with positive job growth and negative per-worker productivity (as measured by the gross domestic output divided by the number of people working in the sector.) Every dollar that goes into healthcare is a dollar taken from elsewhere in the economy. 

Shelp works in the realm of data and she is hesitant to predict the pace of healthcare job growth in the coming years, especially now that the constitutional questions around the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act have been addressed.

“I don’t do an awful lot of forecasting, but if I was thinking about it, given the population, I am not sure where we are going to go with this new healthcare piece that is out there,” she says. “Clearly it is not going away. In fact there will continue to be demand. Exactly how that changes I don’t know.”

 

About Morgan Hunter HealthSearch
Morgan Hunter HealthSearch (MHHS) provides Executive Search and Interim Leadership solutions for hospitals and health systems throughout the United States.  Our services include executive healthcare recruiting, retained healthcare executive search, healthcare interim management, executive placement for hospitals


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