Healthcare Job Growth Up in November

Physicians' offices created 63,700 new jobs in the first 11 months of 2011, compared with 25,300 jobs created in that subsector for all of 2010. Physicians' offices created 2,700 jobs in November and 8,000 jobs in October after posting 9,700 new jobs in September.

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

More than 14.1 million people worked in the healthcare sector in October, with more than 4.7 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.

In the larger economy, the nation's unemployment rate dropped from 9% to 8.6%—its lowest level since March 2009—fueled by 120,000 nonfarm payroll additions. Nonetheless, 14 million people were unemployed. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as people jobless for 27 weeks or longer, was 5.7 million in November, essentially unchanged from October, and represented 43% of the unemployed.