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Healthcare Created 314K Jobs in 2011

 |  By John Commins  
   January 09, 2012

Healthcare created 22,600 jobs in December, finishing a strong year for job growth that saw 314,700 payroll additions in 2011. Healthcare accounted for nearly one in five new jobs in the overall economy, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows.

Hospitals created 9,800 new jobs in December, and 89,100 jobs in 2011, more than double the 37,300 jobs hospitals created in 2010.

"Last year, 2011, was a very good year for St. Luke's Health System. It's going to be more of the same in 2012," said Dawn Murphy, senior vice president – human resources, with the 10-hospital St. Luke's Health System in Kansas City, MO, which has 9,500 employees.

"We are adding staff, particularly nurses, because of our facilities' expanding. We have seen volume increases and that have stimulated our hiring," Murphy said. "We are also an attractive employer and that has always helped us. People want to work here. We received over 100,000 applications for employment last year and we filled 2,000 positions."

Chris Roederer, senior vice president, human resources, at Tampa General Hospital, says the safety-net hospital saw some incremental job growth in 2011.  External pressures, however, including a $20 million Medicaid funding cut from the state of Florida, have created a challenging fiscal environment that will impact hiring.

"It is going to be one of the more difficult years in our history, and we don't expect it to get easier. The pressure is going to continue," he said. "It's very unfortunate. We worked hard to get the reputation we have," Roederer said.

Roederer says TGH has targeted two areas for new jobs. "One has been positions related to the implementation and optimization of our electronic health records. Our IT area has grown substantially to meet that need," he says. "Another area has been in ambulatory services, our primary care centers, and even the employment of physicians."

"It has been reasonably difficult to fill positions but we are getting there," he Roederer explained. "There is substantial competition for primary care physicians and I expect that to be difficult in years to come as hospitals build their primary care networks."

"The IT positions with hospitals, the demand for that specialty and recruiting and retaining those people is going to be even more difficult. They are so specialized and in such high demand. We are finding that already," he said.

Murphy says the search for clinicians with IT competency will remain a challenge in 2012, especially with the coming of meaningful use requirements, and the upgraded ICD-10 medical coding.

"The IT department is always in search of the person who has the combination of clinical and IT skills with all that is going on with healthcare reform," she says. "That has been a focus for us over the past year: to recruit clinical people internally if they are interested in IT, and externally the people who have that magical combination of a clinical background with IT expertise."

"They are hard to find, which is why we try to grow our own when we can. For those of us looking outside the people with advanced skills in that area, it's a finite pool and we are competing for the same pool," she said.

Ambulatory services, which include physicians' offices, accounted for 59% of the job growth in healthcare. The subsector created 11,300 jobs in December and 187,000 jobs in 2011, after creating 166,100 jobs in 2010.

Physicians' offices created 19,000 new jobs in December and 67,600 new jobs in 2011, a near tripling of the 25,300 jobs created in physicians' offices in 2010.

BLS data from November and December are preliminary and may be revised considerably in the coming months.

More than 14.2 million people worked in the healthcare sector at the end of 2011, with nearly 4.8 million of those jobs at hospitals, and more than 6.2 million jobs in ambulatory services, which includes more than 2.3 million jobs in physicians' offices.

The 314,700 jobs created by healthcare represent 19% of the 1.6 million jobs created in the overall economy in 2011.

While there is nothing to indicate that healthcare job growth will slow in 2012, Murphy offered some caveats.

"With healthcare reform it is going to be incumbent upon all of us to be cost efficient," she said. "That is what we are looking at the next couple of years: How can we operate as efficiently as possible? Our reimbursements are going to be lower for the same care. The external pressures are on us to be cost effective. Even if we have a stable workforce, we have cost pressures."

In the larger economy, the nation's unemployment rate dropped from 8.6% to 8.5%—down 0.6% since August, and its lowest level since March 2009. BLS said the 200,000 new jobs created in December came from the healthcare, manufacturing, retail, mining, and transportation sectors.

Nonetheless, 13.1 million people were unemployed in December. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as those who have been jobless for 27 weeks or longer, was little changed at 5.6 million in December, and represented 42.5% of the unemployed.

John Commins is a content specialist and online news editor for HealthLeaders, a Simplify Compliance brand.

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