Healthcare has been a powerful jobs engine throughout the recession and into the recovery. Even as other sectors of the economy shed jobs, medical facilities of all types have added staff, a consequence of America’s aging Baby Boomers.
However, job growth within the sector is anything but uniform. While doctor’s offices and especially outpatient facilities have been steadily adding staff, hospitals and, to a lesser extent, skilled nursing facilities have slowed their hiring, or even begun to reduce staffing.
In May, as the broader healthcare sector increased jobs by 11,000, hospital jobs shrank by nearly 6,000. Home healthcare added 12,900 jobs, with outpatient care centers adding 3,500 jobs.
“Care is being moved out of the hospital… to outpatient settings,” Mark Pauly, a professor of health-care management, business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told The Wall Street Journal recently.
Several factors are at work here, not the least of which is that insurers are demanding price concessions from hospitals that want to be part of their network. That’s prompted hospitals — and physician groups, too — to develop off-site surgical centers where procedures once exclusively performed in the hospital, are now routinely done, with patients sent home to recover.
This has also helped fuel one of the faster growing healthcare areas: home health care. The number of health care aides is growing faster than most other segments. In many cases, low-skill workers earning up to about $15 an hour assist recuperating patients by monitoring them, providing meals, assisting with mobility and hygiene and similar care.
Even when more highly skilled care is required — a registered nurse for instance — the daily cost to an insurer is substantially less than if the patient were in a hospital or nursing facility.
Besides holding costs in check, all but the sickest patients recover faster at home and with less risk of contracting infections found in hospitals.
That said, hospitals are not going to suddenly start laying off staff. From May 2012 to last month, hospitals added 48,800 jobs, according to government reports.