Health care expected to be major job creator through 2020

AMANDA ST. GEORGE, left, shadows nurse Todd Kirschhofer at Thundermist Health Center in West Warwick as part of the Passport to Practice program, designed to give unemployed or underemployed nurses experience and help finding a job. Also pictured are Valerie Furr and her mother, Karen Izzo. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
AMANDA ST. GEORGE, left, shadows nurse Todd Kirschhofer at Thundermist Health Center in West Warwick as part of the Passport to Practice program, designed to give unemployed or underemployed nurses experience and help finding a job. Also pictured are Valerie Furr and her mother, Karen Izzo. / PBN FILE PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

PROVIDENCE – According to a new report, health care will continue to be Rhode Island’s leading private-sector employer during the next decade, with strong growth anticipated in a number of job types, including social assistance workers.

Healthcentric Advisors, Stepping Up RI, and the Hospital Association of Rhode Island – the three members of the Governor’s Workforce Board Rhode Island Health Care Industry Partnership – produced the collaborative skills gap study report on the health care industry in Rhode Island.

Citing numbers from the R.I. Department of Labor and Training, the authors predicted 16.2 percent growth in employment in the health care and social assistance industry between 2010 and 2020, with 12,833 new jobs needing to be filled.

The jobs growth was broken down by types, with some of the strongest growth fields being registered nurses, home health aides, medical assistants, medical secretaries and nursing aides.

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Nearly 700 registered nurse openings alone are expected each year between now and 2018, according to the report. However, the group found that the state’s nursing colleges have been slow to respond to changes in the job market.

The biggest change in the field of nursing, partly in response to the exigencies of the Affordable Care Act, is a transition from acute care nursing to community-based, non-hospital settings, and the state’s nursing programs have yet to fully adjust.

One example of antiquated training given in the report: During the 2012-2013 academic year, less than 6 percent of clinical placements for nursing students were in non-acute facilities (nursing homes, schools and senior centers).

Community College of Rhode Island, the University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, and New England Institute of Technology have nonetheless each recently indicated an awareness of the shifting needs in nursing, the authors noted, and have begun to put into place programs that better match the current employment landscape.

The Passport to Practice program, for one, is a statewide effort to expand the number of non-hospital clinical placements for the state’s nursing students as well as unemployed or underemployed nurses.

The report authors pointed out that education levels for health care positions are, on average, considerably higher than for non-health care industry jobs.

HARI’s Ruth Ricciarelli said that an associate’s degree is a minimum within the industry for the great bulk of jobs.

“The most important thing, the No. 1 takeaway,” Ricciarelli said, “is that there’s a large percentage of jobs in health care that require a minimum of an associate’s degree and those entry-level jobs that require no GED or no high school diploma comprise less than 5 percent of positions. Those jobs are really few and far between.”

Barry Nickerson, of Stepping Up RI, which works to provide training, education, career coaching and support services to low-income Rhode Islanders seeking careers in health care, said that filling the highest rungs of the health care field, medical doctors and other heavily educated staff, promises to be quite challenging, given current trends in the state.

“Despite our state’s high unemployment rates,” Nickerson said, “we don’t have Rhode Islanders who are currently unemployed to fill those positions who are applying for those jobs.”

The full report can be found HERE.

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