It seems logical to understand more about the healthcare job choices and particularly those medical work opportunities that provide the maximum benefit.
People looking for work need to learn the right way to investigate the health care employment market and where to search to uncover medical job openings.
Iowa’s health care industry is about as close to being recession-proof as you can get. Despite continuing structural and financial changes, it was the only Iowa industry to add significant numbers of new jobs during the recession.
State labor statistics show it added 5,500 jobs between May 2008 and December 2009. During the same period Iowa’s total non-farm employment fell by 66,600. Since then, the Iowa economy has added back 34,100 jobs, including 4,300 in health care.
Although health care continues to add jobs, the types of jobs are changing as the industry is pulled and pushed by shifting demographics, new technology and cuts in government funding.
In the last year alone, Mercy Medical Center Des Moines saw its Medicaid payments reduced by $17.5 million, while the hospital’s Medicare payments have been cut by $9 million over the last three years, said Joseph LeValley, Mercy’s senior vice president of planning and advocacy
Those and other cuts are pushing more hospital procedures down to the outpatient and clinic level, areas where the employment growth is occurring, LeValley said.
Mercy opened its first clinic in the Des Moines area 20 years ago and now has 40 metro-area clinics, he said.
Iowa Hospital Association spokesman Scott McIntyre agreed that most hospitals are not adding jobs, although they are typically among the largest employers in their local communities.
Iowa’s 118 hospitals employ about 69,000 people, McIntyre said, although statewide there are about 2,000 fewer hospital jobs now than in 2008. New medical jobs are created daily.
One area where an explosion of employment is just beginning, McIntyre said, is med tech record keeping. Most doctors are just beginning to convert patient records and billing procedures from handwritten to digital text that can be stored electronically.
“People who know the new (government billing) rules and the technology will be very sought after,” McIntyre said.
Along with hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living facilities are also major employers. About 55,000 Iowans work for them, according to the Iowa Health Care Association, which represents for-profit and nonprofit nursing homes.
“We’ve seen small growth in nursing facilities, but larger growth in assisted living and ancillary services,” said Steve Ackerson, executive director of the Iowa Health Care Association.
The number of assisted living facilities in Iowa has grown 24 percent in the past five years to 308, with each facility employing an average of 25 full-time workers, he said.
“Home health is probably one of the fastest-growing areas,” Ackerson said, although hospice and therapy providers are also strong growth areas.
There’s no mystery to what’s driving the demand, said Mercy’s LeValley. “Our population is aging and the demand for care is going up,” he said.
“We’re trying to manage chronic diseases and other kinds of health problems outside the hospital setting as much as possible,” LeValley said.figuring out which job is right for you
So what’s it like at the academic level, at the colleges and universities that train health care workers?
“Interest in nursing is very high,” said Brian Tingleff, vice president of Des Moines-based Mercy College of Health Sciences. There is also increased competition for well-paying jobs.
For example, he said, Mercy College recently had 133 applications for nine openings in its diagnostic medical sonography curriculum. Such specialty nursing careers “are small relative to the overall nursing profession, but they are all going to boom,” Tingleff said.
Other jobs go begging. The University of Iowa’s Sue Zaleski, who is chairwoman of the Council of Laboratory Professionals, wrote an article earlier this year about the nationwide shortage of trained lab technicians.
The popularity of “CSI” television shows has helped some, Zaleski said, but many medical laboratories do not have enough people to handle the workload. A 2011 survey showed the vacancies were highest at blood banks, she said. But other areas of health care are booming.
In fact, Grand View College reports strong growth in its biology curriculum, which is considered a pre-med track for many students. Biology enrollments are up 25 percent since 2008, said Debbie Barger, vice president of enrollment.
By contrast, she said, nursing enrollments at Grand View have been declining since 2005 and are now at 377, about 35 percent lower than the peak of 581.
Pay could be a factor. Iowa’s average pay for nurses is among the lowest in the nation, but jobs that require most specialization pay better.
At Des Moines University, the number of applications, rather than enrollments, is the best indicator of demand, said enrollment director Margie Gehringer. Enrollments are limited by the school’s facilities and don’t vary a lot the way applications do.
She said the biggest increase in applications in recent years has been for DMU’s physician’s assistant program, followed by its doctor of osteopathic program and physical therapy program.
Mercy’s LeValley said that he tells young people who are interested in a health career that it can be “one of the most rewarding places you can work and that the industry needs high quality, dedicated young people.”
But he said he also tells them “the economics are going to be a challenge, and we will need creativity to find new ways to deliver health care.”
From: The Des Moines Register
You will need to take a look at the large number of information resources which are available today to just about every person for example the internet, medical periodicals, companies linked to investigation and development, associations, directories, job hot lines, and job employment fairs, which all are placed in healthcare Job market.