Health Care Jobs Provide Bright Spark

Health Care Jobs Strike a Bright Spark amid 2012 Uncertainties. There continues to be an uptick for health care employment, according to the BLS. Health care employment continued to increase in May by 33,000 jobs, up from 19,000 in April. Within the industry, employment in ambulatory health care services, which includes offices of physicians and outpatient care centers, rose by 23,000. Over the year, health care employment has risen by 340,000, a trend that is seen month over month. Hospitals hired 4,500 persons in May 2012, slightly above the April 2012 number of 4,100.

It continues to hold true that health care is one of the few industries that have consistently seen growth and increase employment month over month. Texas is benefiting from this steady growth but even with this increased growth the hospital workforce continues to have large enough gaps in “hot job” rolls and need constant engagement of the various stakeholders to address this concern. One of the pressure points is to close these gaps which sometimes result in poor hires. The impact is felt in the quality of care patients receive and the resulting key performance indicator of low patient satisfaction scores. The Dallas-Fort Worth Hospital Council Foundation and the other member partners of the Regional Workforce Planning Collaborative continue to develop strategies to help answer the business questions around ensuring the workforce needs of North Texas are met.

The collaborative has started looking at the top twenty hot jobs for hospitals with physical therapists and operating room RN coming up at the very top. The regional workforce tool will serve as the main source to provide analytics for these jobs in the region space. As more hospitals join this collaborative effort the goal is to provide more robust benchmarks by boosting the confidence level of the data to become more and more reflective of the region. Other national, state and regional resources may be included to provide comparison. A process is in place which engages subject matter experts from the region’s educational institutions and partner hospitals in dialogue to help understand these jobs more fully. These are all strategies deployed to ensure the North Texas region has the right workforce at the right time fully equipped to assume the right jobs for the region.

For more information on how you can join this collaborative, please email nfrancis@dfwhcfoundation.org or call 972-717-4279