Healthcare Job Growth Slows in April

The healthcare sector created 19,000 jobs in April—accounting for nearly one in six of the 115,000 new jobs in the larger economy for the month, new federal data shows.

April job figures released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that healthcare sector job growth is decelerating apace with slowing job growth across the larger economy. Like healthcare, the overall economy recorded strong job growth in January and February that sharply tailed off in March and April.

Elaina Genser, senior vice president of Witt/Kieffer, an Oak Brook, IL–based healthcare executive search firm, says the healthcare sector should continue to see strong job growth relative to the rest of the economy.

"It's a combination of factors and one of them is the fact that healthcare is something that is not easily outsourced. That alone makes it unique," Genser says. "The aging population and the desire to cut costs are creating all kinds of new jobs that focus on bringing care back to the future, back to people in their own homes."

Ambulatory services, which include physicians' offices, accounted for 15,400 new jobs in April, followed by hospitals, which created 4,100 jobs. Nursing homes and residential care facilities lost 500 jobs.

Genser says ambulatory services will continue to be the strongest area of healthcare job growth as providers move to consumer-friendly venues that allow for "one-stop shopping."

"As [hospital leaders] think about what makes sense for the consumer and what makes sense for their own employees, they figure out these ambulatory campuses make a lot more sense," she says. "There's plenty of parking. Your lab is right there. The outpatient imaging is right there. Everything is right there in a cluster, easily accessible to people, as opposed to hospitals that many times have aging facilities that are not necessarily laid out for efficiency."

In the first four months of 2012, healthcare accounted for 14.4% of the 803,000 jobs created in the United States. Even with the slowdown over the last two months, healthcare job growth is outstripping the pace set in 2011. The sector created 116,300 jobs so far this year, compared with the 96,900 jobs created in the first four months of 2011, BLS reports.

Genser says the only thing that could slow job growth in healthcare would be if the U.S. Supreme Court throws out the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. "That would slow [job growth] but it won't stop it. It's really the right model, and now that there has been impetus for it, people are excited about it. Improving care in their communities is what they want to do," she says.

BLS data from March and April are preliminary and may be revised considerably in the coming months.

In the larger economy, nonfarm payroll employment rose by 115,000 in April, with most of the new jobs coming in professional services, retail sales, and healthcare. The unemployment rate was little changed at 8.1% . In March the economy created 154,000 jobs, a significant decline after gains averaging 252,000 jobs per month in January and February, BLS reports.

Revised BLS figures show that healthcare created 25,300 jobs in March, 38,200 jobs in February, and 33,800 jobs in January, continuing a strong trend in job growth that saw 296,900 payroll additions in 2011. Healthcare accounted for more than 18% of the 1.6 million new jobs in the overall economy in 2011.

More than 14.2 million people worked in the healthcare sector in April, with more than 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.

Even with the modest gains, BLS said 12.5 million people were unemployed in April, a slight improvement from March. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as those who have been jobless for 27 weeks or longer, fell slightly to 5.1 million people in April, who represented 41.3% of the unemployed.