The healthcare sector created 26,000 jobs in March, a precipitous deceleration in growth when compared with the first two months of 2012, new federal data shows.
Even with the slowdown, healthcare job growth is outstripping the pace set in 2011. The sector created 101,800 jobs in the first quarter of 2012 compared with the 61,000 jobs created in the first three months of 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
Healthcare remains a major job growth engine in the overall economy. In the first quarter of 2012, healthcare accounted for 16% of the 635,000 jobs created in the United States. March recorded 8,100 new jobs in hospitals, and 12,100 new jobs in ambulatory services, which included 7,600 jobs in physicians’ offices.
Dawn Murphy, senior vice president, human resources for Saint Luke’s Health System says the Kansas City, MO-based provider increased full-time equivalent staff by 6.59% in 2011. The system has 9,500 employees. That employment growth is continuing in 2012.
"We have seen a growth in our employment because of two things. No. 1 we are seeing our volumes increase. Our newest hospital, which is St. Luke’s East, is on a new expansion and they’re hiring for that. We are building another unit on our newest hospital," Murphy says.
"And also as most health systems our size are doing we are integrating physician practices. We are hiring and when we bring on the physician practice we bring on the employees as well. So, our employee population is growing from organic growth and integration of physician practices," she says.
Murphy says there is also continued demand for healthcare IT staff to help implement meaningful use and address other issues related to electronic medical records. "We are always looking for good clinical IT people, just like everybody else," she says.
Revised BLS figures show that healthcare created 42,200 jobs in February, continuing a strong trend in job growth that saw 296,900 payroll additions in 2011. Healthcare accounted for more than 18% of new jobs in the overall economy last year, BLS data shows.
Murphy says the drop in healthcare job growth in March could be linked to most health systems’ budget cycles. "This may be too simple an answer but there is a little bit of a pent up demand until budgets are approved," she says. "If a hospital is on a calendar year budgets get approved in late fall, December and they have these new FTEs they have approved. So we tend to have active hiring because we have positions that have been approved in the budget process."
More than 14.2 million people worked in the healthcare sector in March, 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.
In 2011, the 296,900 jobs created by healthcare represented more than 18% of the 1.6 million jobs created in the overall economy that year.
BLS data from February and March are preliminary and may be revised considerably in the coming months.
In the larger economy, the nation's unemployment rate dropped from 8.3% in February to 8.2% in March, with 120,000 new jobs reported for the month. BLS said the jobs created in March came mostly from healthcare, manufacturing, and food service.
Even with the modest gains, BLS said 12.7 million people were unemployed in March, slightly improved from February’s measure. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as those who have been jobless for 27 weeks or longer, was little changed at 5.3 million in March, and represented 42.5% of the unemployed.
John Commins is the news editor for HealthLeaders.