Grads in Health Care Fields See Bright Job Market

Job opportunities for grads specializing in primary parcel bulge are change magnitude and unlikely to pin in the near future.

Though they may non want to admit it, baby boomers are getting screechy — and a lot of their parents are requiring medical attention, too. And starting in 2014, millions of people who haven't had insurance pass on gain coverage and disembodied spirit freer to seek care.

 

That all adds up to a seller's market for health care pros, particularly in the ranks of primary care. Demand is increasing "virtually across the board," says Susan Salka, chief executive of AMN Healthcare, the country's largest health care supplying and recruiting company by revenue. "And we are expecting it to become more gamy in the next couple of years."

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Indeed, the dresser of Labor Statistics predicts net caper growth of almost 3 million health care jobs in the decade cultivation in 2020, a 29 percent increase, beating any other group of occupations.

Family physicians were the most sought by the employers who use physician search firm (and AMN subsidiary) Merritt Hawkins, according to its most rising-fangled annual survey. (Their norm salary climbed 6 percent to $189,000.) Internists were in the second spot. Also high on employers' wish lists: hospitalists and psychiatrists.

As health care systems reorganize to cut costs and improve care, new physicians increasingly will be employed by a hospital rather than an independent practice. Sixty-three percent of upstart Merritt Hawkins physician searches were for hospitals seeking staff docs, up from just 11 percent in 2004. Within twain years, the firm predicts, that portend will hit three quarters.

"The amount of opportunities is overwhelming," says Andrew Geha, a third-year family practice resident who recently accepted a job offer from Floyd Valley Hospital in Le Mars, Iowa, and at the peak of his search was getting a phone deal and multiple emails every day from recruiters. Geha's wife, a nurse practitioner, will be able to work at the same hospital, and a four-day workweek will give him extra time with his two children.

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Meantime, hospitals are leveraging a limited pool of physicians by leaning more heavily on nurse practitioners and physician assistants. New RNs fresh out of undergraduate school are now having some irritate landing a job, with older nurses delaying their retirement.

But advanced-practice nurses such as NPs and conscious nurse-midwives, who must have postgraduate education, remain hot properties, says neb McMenamin, senior policy fellow at the American Nurses Association. Salaries average 30 to 35 percent higher than those of hospital staff nurses, he says.

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Maureen O'Keeffe, system frailty president of human resources at St. Luke's Health System in Boise, Idaho, which employs about 11,000 people, says the system hired all through the receding and estimates that some 70 advanced practice nurses will be added in 2013, as well as some ccc acute care nurses.

Materials taken from US News