Amid the continuing bad news in employment, healthcare has been one sector of the economy that has proven remarkably strong. But recent trends in online job ads suggest the long upward slope of jobs in the industry may not hold.
WANTED has noted a steady decline in the number of new ads year-over-year since the start of the recession. And more interestingly, new job ads as tracked by WANTED have slipped into negative territory.
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Our sense is that this drop in actual job ads could soon be reflected in a decline in actual jobs.
But if there is a weakening in the sector, it's not yet appearing in the economy. WANTED forecast a rise of 36,000 jobs in the sector for February.
And when the official numbers were released on March 6, healthcare was, in fact, still adding jobs, albeit slightly fewer than we had forecast. The industry added 30,400 jobs in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Stimulating the healthcare economy
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The economic stimulus plan recently signed by President Obama offers a number of provisions aimed at the healthcare industry — including the creation of a new government agency tasked with measuring the effectiveness of prescription medicines. In this analysis, Human Resources Executive magazine looks at what the effects of the stimulus are likely to be on the industry.
Nursing shortage plagues hospitals
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Book from JAMA on the future of nursing
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Healthcare overview: Reports, data and more
BLS' look at healthcare
Healthcare is the largest industry in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In this overview of employment in the sector published in March of 2008, BLS predicted that as many as 3 million new jobs would be added to the sector between 2006 and 2016.
The ARF — datasets from the healthcare industry
Looking for some healthcare numbers to crunch? The Area Resource File, published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is a collection of downloadable data from more than 50 sources. Researchers can examine hiring, demograhics, hospital utilization figures and more — extrapolating what the future may hold for individual companies and the sector as a whole.
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