Hiring in a crisis: Health-care job postings spike 35%
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Hiring in a crisis: Health-care job postings spike 35%

When hospitals need more doctors for their emergency rooms or related specialities, they turn to people like Adam Brown. He’s an ER doctor in his own right, but he also is an executive at Envision Healthcare — which connects 27,000 medical providers across the United States to the right hospitals and care centers.

In recent weeks, Dr. Brown and colleagues have been mobilizing fast to find more respiratory specialists. Demand is intense in New York and New Jersey, he reports, because those states are seeing the largest surge in patients with breathing issues related to the Covid-19 pandemic. But California, Florida, Texas and Arizona are growth markets, too.

Where do those doctors come from? Often, Envision has relationships with doctors who already live and work in the area. When necessary, though, Envision taps into its Envoy program of several hundred mobile doctors who are ready to travel to a different state. “I used to be one myself,” Dr. Brown says. “We fly them in.”

Throughout health care, from doctors to medical assistants, job listings have been surging. While weekly trends are volatile, this special edition of LinkedIn’s Workforce Report shows March’s health-care job postings are running 35% ahead of January’s pace when looking at the average number of job postings per day. That’s happening even as the overall U.S. labor outlook is skidding.

 What’s driving this surge? News items, interviews and the data itself show two main factors at work. In big metro areas such as New York, San Francisco and Boston, the boom in job listings closely mirrors the current or expected influx of patients whose coronavirus exposure has led to Covid-19 symptoms. 

San Francisco mayor London Breed, for example, this week posted on Twitter that her city just hired 82 nurses, right after she “waived regulations to allow us to hire nurses on the spot so we can prepare for the increase of coronavirus cases that we know is coming.”

Similarly, Jack Shirey, a nursing-leadership recruiter at the B.E. Smith division of AMN Healthcare, says his firm is fielding search requests for “Covid-19 specialists.” Even if that’s just a fancy new name for experts in infection prevention and control, he says, it underscores hospitals’ commitment to getting the deepest and most relevant expertise possible to address crucial new concerns.

Looking more broadly at health-care job listings, it’s clear that long-running industry dynamics -- separate from anything related to coronavirus — are nudging hiring goals upward, too. As labor experts have long noted, health care is the one field that’s always hiring, no matter how the rest of the economy is faring. 

Health care was just 5% of the U.S. economy in 1960 and 13% in 2000; it’s now nearly 18%. In fields ranging from autism to weight-loss therapy, standards of care keep advancing. And that creates more jobs all the time.

Consider HCA Healthcare, the largest U.S. hospital company and a leading sources of new job postings. Both HCA’s website and its LinkedIn jobs page feature more than 10,000 open jobs, spanning a vast range of needs. By HCA’s tally these include 5,458 in nursing, along with more than 2,400 in nursing support, plus 933 in imaging, 491 in laboratory work and even 280 in food services and nutrition.

 HCA's openings stretch across the United States, including major markets such as Florida, Texas, Colorado and its headquarters city of Nashville, Tenn. Nursing opportunities include a wide mix of specialties, ranging from business-as-usual openings in areas such as post-partum care to additional emergency room jobs that could address an influx of patients with Covid-19 symptoms.

Even in the difficult new era of “social distancing,” health-care recruiting keeps carrying on. B.E. Smith’s Shirey says he, employers and candidates are getting used to doing much more of their work via video conferencing, with in-person visits becoming rarer. 

Shirey also is educating employers that it may no longer be feasible to line up four or five finalists willing to wrap up their candidacy with a site visit. Settling on two or three finalists may be the new norm, he says. All the same, he says, he’s still working at his normal tempo of having 12 to 15 searches going simultaneously, at various stages in the hiring pipeline.

Looking ahead, it’s possible that health care’s labor needs could grow hugely if coronavirus runs rampant. The U.S. currently has about 924,000 licensed hospital beds, including 75,000 in California. Gavin Newsom, California’s governor, spoke this week of perhaps needing an additional 50,000 hospital beds in his state alone. 

Meanwhile, New York State is building a temporary 1,000-bed field hospital at the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is advocating a doubling of his state’s hospital-bed capacity to 110,000. 

If such projections are even fractionally right, that will mean a vastly greater load for doctors, nurses and other heath-care providers. To expand capacity, there's talk of asking recent medical-industry retirees to return to work. Another approach involves shortening medicine’s long training cycle to get young doctors into front-line work faster.

New York University is letting its fourth year medical students graduate three months early and start practicing right away. Other initiatives will redirect medical residents and interns from their current specialty training to the more immediate needs of fighting a pandemic.

Fortunately, the existing medical system may provide a lot more flexibility than the public realizes. One hospital vice president notes that elective surgeries for conditions like knee repairs and gallbladder removals are already being reduced, so that doctors and nurses in surgery units can be redeployed. 

Anesthesiologists, in particular, have extensive experience with patients on ventilators. They could take on vital new roles in managing Covid-19 patients with severe breathing issues. Similarly, nurses in administrative jobs could be redeployed to front-line patient care. 

In addition, telemedicine opens up powerful ways of bridging the geographic gaps between big metro hospitals and suburban or rural patients. Envision’s Dr. Brown, the emergency medicine physician, points out that telemedicine also allows quarantined doctors to continue assessing patients safely even if their own potential exposure to coronavirus would otherwise put them on the sidelines for 14 days. 

Finally, home care -- even for quite sick patients -- might prove safer than being in an overcrowded hospital. “That’s the most interesting question,” says Ira Wilson, chair of the Department of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown University’s School of Public Health.

Rapid advances in home care the past 20 years make it possible to provide a high level of care, with appropriate home visits from medical personnel. That also lessens the strain on food-service departments, security, switchboard operators and all the other elements of personal service associated with a hospital stay.

One way or another, the health-care sector is mobilizing to face the pandemic head on, even as many of the rest of us stay home to "flatten the curve."

LinkedIn data scientist Michael Lombard contributed to this article.

Peter Calka

Chief Executive Officer at Wumart LLC

3y

In my opinion, we already have too many people working in medical, pharmaceutical fields. We should respect our bodies and take care of ourselves better in the first place. Nobody is firing us to become obese, get addicted to drinking and smoking. We should learn to fast and exercise. I am not a sing, have my own list of what I should improve, at the same time the cost of healthcare is escalating and unfortunately we will never be able to take care of everyone. At the same time, we can help ourselves.

Jacqueline Jordan

Office Manager/Medical Assistant w/phlebotomist specialty at Private-practice

3y

Call mayor’s , Governors office see what they say...Physicians , Register Nurses and other healthcare professionals

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Amy Andrews MSN, FNP-BC

Dermatology and Aesthetic Nurse Practitioner

3y

I am looking to help with the COVID-19 I am a NP in Cincinnati currently office is closed due to working in Dermatology. Anyone have any insight on who to contact, I have been trying for weeks with no replies

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Will they be accepting foreign/international medical graduates that have NOT obtained US residency but have completed a residency program in their home country ?

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