After a months-long slump, the September jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed signs of vigor. A surge in job creation within the healthcare sector helped push the national unemployment rate to its lowest point in 43 months.
In the overall economy, the unemployment rate fell from 8.1% in August to 7.8% in September—the lowest since January 2009. Since January of this year, the number of unemployed has decreased by 456,000.
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The overall number of jobs added in September was 114,000, a number lower than 2012's average month-to-month growth of 146,000 jobs. Keep in mind, that these are "preliminary" numbers, subject to revision. The latest jobs data showed almost across-the-board growth: finance added 13,000 jobs, professional and business services added 13,000, leisure and hospitality added 11,000, the government added 10,000, and construction added 5,000. Manufacturing, meanwhile, cut 16,000 jobs.
But the healthcare sector showed surprising strength and accounted for 38% of all new jobs created in September. That translates to 43,500 new jobs for the month, nearly triple the sector's job growth rate over the summer, which averaged 15,000 new jobs a month.
Healthcare's September growth spurt far surpassed its performance over the past twelve months, which averaged 28,000 new jobs per month. If the pokey August numbers gave observers pause, September's data is keeping doubts at bay, at least for now.
"We are very excited about the numbers," said Stephanie Drake, Executive Director of the American Society for Healthcare Human Resources Administration (ASHHRA). "It's important to us that these numbers are going up, and jobs are increasing in the healthcare space in a variety of different areas."
You'd think that President Obama would pull out his executive stationary to write a thank-you note to healthcare. Since this time last year, the industry has added 295,000 jobs. Since June of 2009, when the recession officially ended, it has added 872,000 jobs—37% of the total nonfarm job growth.
"We have seen an increase in requests for our services for open positions across all of these areas of inpatient and outpatient care, but I think we're starting to see the ripple effect of preparing and adapting an approach to fit that [lower-cost delivery] model," said Cynthia Kinnas, president of Randstad Healthcare.
According to Kinnas, as a reaction to health reform regulations and an improving economy, there is more money being invested into staffing healthcare facilities, to not only support caring for the flood of newly insured patients, but to do so at a higher quality.
Kinnas says hiring managers are exhibiting a change of mindset. "There's definitely a war for good talent," said Kinnas, who has worked in healthcare for 20 years.
"You would think with more positions open, that healthcare facilities might lower their standards, but they've actually become more selective. The criteria are up. We have a very difficult time placing someone without a solid five years of experience."
But while hospitals hired more doctors, more nurses, and generally more staff in September, to the tune of 8,000 more jobs, that's not where the most recent jobs report showed the most significant gains.
The delivery of healthcare outside of the hospital is telling the story of healthcare's transitions, and it's following the migration of patients to a model of care that is more personalized.
"People are getting almost all of their healthcare services standing up these days. People certainly don't want to lie down and they certainly don't want to stay overnight," says Mark V. Pauly, a healthcare economist at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Within healthcare, ambulatory care services had the largest job growth, creating 29,800 more jobs in September than August—67% of the job growth in healthcare as a whole. Making up this number were 6,600 jobs added in physicians' offices, 9,400 jobs added in outpatient care centers, and 7,800 jobs added in home health care services.
This month's growth in ambulatory care services represents a return to the trend, before the summer slump that began in June, of job growth that has averaged 26,780 per month this year.
"Consumers are starting to realize you can catch a terrible disease in a hospital, so it's becoming more common thinking that generally it's not a good idea to hang out around there more than you have to," says Pauly.
The perception of the healthcare industry as a juggernaut holds. "As long as people would prefer to have the quality and quantity of their life improve, rather than getting a new refrigerator, then healthcare will continue to grow as it has been over this decade," Pauly said.
But here's the irony, according to Pauly: "Because the government pays for so much of healthcare, it wants the spending growth to slow, but if it really succeeds in doing that, it's going to kill job growth."
Chelsea Rice is an associate editor for HealthLeaders Media.
