The Health Workforce Solutions LLC Labor Market Pulse Index, a quarterly barometer of local market healthcare workforce fluctuations, shows a slowdown in demand for healthcare workers across a number of regions.
Despite the overall decline, there have been notable improvements in the San Francisco Bay, Seattle, Tampa, and Philadelphia metropolitan areas for the first quarter of 2010. The Sacramento and New York/Northern New Jersey areas ranked at the bottom of the 30 markets tracked.
Data show that much of the growth was fueled by new expansion plans and large-scale hiring announcements at organizations including Genentech in South San Francisco, Swedish Hospital Group in Seattle, and Jefferson Health System in Philadelphia.
“I think we are just seeing renewed caution in a number of markets after a surprising spike last quarter,” said David Cherner, managing partner of San Francisco-based HWS. “However, now that there is clarity around healthcare reform, we expect hiring plans to be much more aggressive over the next couple of quarters, particularly when compared to last year.”
The LMPI composite index, a representative basket of the 30 largest markets, posted an 8 percent drop in the first quarter of 2010 from the fourth quarter of 2009, after a nearly 20 percent increase the previous quarter.
“We are also beginning to see many forward-thinking organizations restarting dormant longer-term workforce planning exercises in preparation for what will undoubtedly become the most competitive healthcare labor market we have ever seen,” Cherner said.
Now that healthcare reform has been enacted, the Administration and Congress have must work together to establish a comprehensive and coordinated national health workforce policy to ensure health reform's successful implementation, according to Steven A. Wartman, president and CEO of the Association of Academic Health Centers.
"Our health workforce is already strained by powerful economic and demographic forces," Wartman said. "If we do not significantly improve how we educate, train, and mobilize our health workforce, we will not have the appropriate mix and geographic distribution of health professionals to meet the increased demand for healthcare services that will accompany expanded access to coverage, especially in already underserved urban and rural communities."
"The media has focused on primary care physicians," said Wartman, "but the challenges affect the entire health workforce, including nursing, dentistry, behavioral health, gerontology, and many other disciplines."
The AAHC has put forward recommendations from its report, “Out of Order, Out of Time: The State of the Nation's Health Workforce,” asking policymakers to develop and implement an integrated, coordinated, strategic national health workforce policy as a primary goal of the newly created national health workforce commission.
Wartman said stakeholders should work together to harmonize conflicting national and state-based regulatory and private self-regulatory standards that create significant barriers to optimizing the health workforce.