Welcome to Health Care Jobs articles category.

You can find informaion on Health Care Jobs articles and news.

While employment in Canada rose 23,000 in July, the health and social services sector is well ahead of the job race.Employment in this sector continued to build on gains in recent months, with an increase of 35,000.

Since March, employment in health care has grown by 69,000, mostly in hospitals. Added health care and social assistance and education employment has led to an upturn in public sector employment so far in 2002.

Employment rose 23,000 in July, while more people entered the labour market in search of work, causing the unemployment rate to edge up 0.1 percentage points to 7.6%. All of July’s employment increase was in full-time work.

Since the labour market turned around in January, employment has surged 326,000 (+2.2%) for an average monthly gain of 47,000. This is in sharp contrast to employment in the United States, which has been flat for the last five months.

Since October 2001, the proportion of the population that was active in the labour market in Canada (the participation rate) has jumped a full percentage point to 66.8%, the largest 10-month increase since 1984. In contrast, the U.S. participation rate has fallen and is now lower than the Canadian rate for the first time in over ten years.

For the second consecutive month, Alberta and British Columbia led employment growth, with respective increases of 26,000 and 16,000 in July.

Health care employment continued to build on gains in recent months, with an increase of 35,000. Since March, employment in health care has grown by 69,000, mostly in hospitals. Added health care and social assistance and education employment has led to an upturn in public sector employment so far in 2002.

Many readers recently finished their summer camp season. The pace of autumn, with its cool evenings and time to sit with feet propped on a trusty hamper, is an excellent time to mull ideas and review notes. It’s also the time to update materials for the next season. As a result, this article focuses on updating your camp’s health-care plan by presenting ideas to guide your revision process. Information is drawn from current literature, changing practices, and those elements of your program that provide indicators of your camp’s health status.

As you contemplate each topic, remember that camp practices–especially those in sensitive areas like health care–must comply with the regulations that govern your camp’s operation. While ideas are global, their application must be locally sensitive. Consequently, remember to have revisions reviewed by appropriate people such as legal council, trusted parents, camp health-care staff, your program’s supervising physician, and your insurance specialist.

What Indicators Should I Note From My Camp’s Experience?

Policy updates and changes should be driven by a need to change. So the first step begins with a review of your camp-specific data. Consider what the information from the next few paragraphs tells you. It will provide an indication not only of what might need changing but also how critical that change is to your camp’s operation.

Begin with your camp log and a summer calendar. Count the number of people seen each day in your health center and mark that number on the calendar. Do not include those people who received a daily medication; we’ll get to them later. Rather, simply count the number of campers and staff who were seen for emergent health needs. Assuming a normal population, which includes people with chronic health needs like asthma, a camp health center usually sees about 10 percent-15 percent of its population on any given day. Does this reflect the experience of your camp’s health center? Some days will be very quiet and others will be very busy; in general, however, look for a tendency to cluster around this 10-15 percentile target.

Ann Lloyd has been appointed the new NHS director in Wales. Her appointment means that women now occupy all four top positions in health and social care in the principality.

Ms Lloyd, aged 53, a former chief executive of Frenchay Healthcare NHS Trust in Bristol, is part of a team that includes Jane Hurt (the Assembly health secretary), Dr Ruth Hall (chief medical officer), and Helen Thomas (head of social care).

Ms Lloyd said that her main priority was the implementation of the new NHS plan in Wales, under which the five health authorities will be abolished by April 2003 and which will also see the National Assembly taking direct control of its health responsibilities.

Some CEOs spend years positioning their companies for rapid growth. For Sam Ervin, CEO of SCAN Health Plan, the dream became a reality. In just six years, his health plan expanded from 8,000 members and $50 million in revenue to its current position of serving more than 50,000 members and revenues of $500 million–a tenfold increase.

Today, SCAN Health Plan is the largest of four Social Health Maintenance Organizations in the United States. The not-for-profit company has become a leader in providing medical and social health care to seniors. Its goal: to help seniors successfully live at home for as long as possible.

The company’s history of growth is exciting, but it did not come without significant challenges. Foremost among them: assembling the right leadership team.

When SCAN Health Plan was on the verge of significant growth, Ervin recognized that the leadership team in place did not have the skills to lead the company through a period of rapid growth. Assembling the right team involved several human resource challenges, including recruitment, selection, orientation, and team-building–to name a few.

For help, Ervin turned to the “Job*Person*Match” process from PersonalCode Inc. He used the tools to recruit and hire the right people, create effective teams at executive and middle-management levels, and determine appropriate internal moves within his management ranks. He also used the tools to identify ways he could change his own management style to inspire more people and become a better leader.

Ervin says the PersonalCode tools have worked behind the scenes over the last 12 years to help propel SCAN Health Plan through a period of rapid growth that created change in the organization. “I was looking for a tool to help identify issues and challenges employees were facing in their jobs,” he says. “I wanted to help employees get the most from their jobs and make substantial contributions to the company. I also realized this tool could help me understand how my leadership style and my preferences affect my job behavior.”

Machiavelli’s words describe your job as a health care leader in today’s rapidly changing environment. Pressure for change is great and failure rates are high. We must change and yet many people lack enthusiasm for both the required outcomes and the process of getting from here to there.
Avoiding change is not a long-term option

Large powerful forces are driving change into our health care organizations. These forces include patients, businesses, competitors, government regulations, technologies, and demographic trends.

Demands to improve quality, enhance patient safety, strengthen physician/administrator relations and implement new technologies require fundamental shifts in the way we do things in our health care organizations. As organizations attempt to make the transitions required to respond effectively to these new pressures, the requirements often multiply in chain reactions that lead to the need for yet further changes.

For example, implementing new technologies often results in the need for workflow redesigns, which in turn require changes in compensation systems. Like falling dominoes, each change event triggers numerous other adjustments in a chain of reactions. In the face of such pressures, organizations must rely on their people to make required shifts in their attitudes and behaviors. Often these do not occur.

Reactions to change

How do your people react when faced with today’s demands for ongoing change? Answers often include stressed, worried, fearful, overwhelmed, angry, and resistant.

While a few people respond with excitement, many drag their feet regarding leadership objectives as well as the behavior changes required to reach the outcomes. (2)

How do you respond when your organization announces a new and demanding change initiative? That probably depends on your past experience with change, as well as your confidence in current leadership.

For many people who have been through unsuccessful change initiatives, reactions are often similar to that of a rat looking down a maze, seeing food at the end, but realizing that there is a good chance of electric shock before reaching the food.

Bad, or unethical, business practices have always been a concern for physicians and health care organizations. But recent high-profile business catastrophes refocused our attention on the responsibilities physicians must keep in mind when functioning as officers or board members.

Following federal legislation arising from the corporate scandals at Enron and WorldCom–and in light of the recent litigation against health care organizations for fraud or unethical billing practices–a review of potential ethical conflicts and pitfalls is important.

Case study 1: I was merely doing my duty as a medical staff member when I agreed to serve on the hospital’s board of directors.

Dr. Smith, the president of a local multispecialty clinic, was flattered and pleased to be nominated to serve on the board of directors of his local hospital. Competent in medical management from his tenure as a medical staff officer at the hospital and his experiences at the clinic, Smith gladly accepted the board position.

While serving on the board, Smith learned much about hospital governance and operations. Additionally, his expertise on quality and patient care served the other non-medical board members well because many operational and financial issues required both clinical and non-clinical guidance.

While attending the annual spring board of directors’ retreat, Smith participated in many strategic planning discussions. The hospital’s census was declining and hospital management engaged a national health care consulting firm to present the board with new ideas for producing revenue.

The consulting firm studied both national and local health trends, accessed both national and local utilization and demographic information, and formulated three specific strategic opportunities to reverse the hospital’s declining revenues.

1. The first involved building facilities for a comprehensive oncology program and recruiting both a medical and radiation oncologist.

2. The second called for the alignment and merger with other hospitals in a 200-mile radius to form a regional, multi-hospital corporation to achieve some economies of scale.

3. The final strategic opportunity called for development of an outpatient imaging and surgery center.

It was that pain again. Rose-Marie Shaffer popped a couple of Aleve as she had done every night for the previous week and got ready for bed. The longtime nurse assumed the nagging ache in her arm was from using the computer too long at work. At 11:10 that night, she realized it wasn’t. As she combed her hair, the pain moved to her chest. “I woke my daughter up and said, ‘I think I need to go to the hospital. I think I’m having a heart attack,’” she recalled.

That was in 2000. Five years later, Shaffer is still paying for that two-day stay at Advocate South Suburban Hospital. The bill came to $18,800. At the time, Shaffer was the director of nursing at a west suburban home health care agency. As a full-time employee, she assumed she’d have insurance, but it turned out that she didn’t.

Following the heart attack, she couldn’t work for six months. She was behind in her mortgage payments, and she was threatened with foreclosure. “Who do you try to pay? Do you try to catch up on the mortgage on your house, or do you pay a hospital bill and sit out in the middle of the street?” Shaffer questioned. With no financial relief in sight, Shaffer did what a growing number of ill-stricken families have done: file for bankruptcy.

A recent Harvard University study estimated that nearly half of all personal bankruptcies nationwide are due to illness and medical bills. Illinois has the fifth-highest estimated number of such cases in the nation, with 40,168 medical-related cases out of 79,777 bankruptcy filings in 2004. Those numbers put Illinois ahead of New York, which has 6.5 million more residents and is estimated to have 1,523 fewer medical-related cases.

“There can be no doubt that there are more families than ever before collapsing into bankruptcy in the aftermath of a serious medical problem,” said Elizabeth Warren, co-author of the study.

And things could get worse, experts say. The cost of health care continues to rise, and proposed federal legislation could make filing for personal bankruptcy more difficult this spring.

Now 65, Shaffer uses about 88 percent of her roughly $4,300 monthly take-home pay toward her payments–$2,088 for her creditors and $1,700 for her mortgage. Filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy, one of two types of personal bankruptcy, allowed Shaffer to keep her home in south suburban Country Club Hills while paying her creditors a reduced amount over a three-year period, which ends in early 2006.

THANKS to rising economic fears among workers, Los Angeles County’s 81 hospitals may be in for another financial boost.

A coalition of hospital, doctor and professional groups is seeking to place an initiative on the November 2004 ballot that would raise $420 million for emergency rooms in the state, with $170 million earmarked for the county.

The effort was launched by the Coalition for Emergency Care less than one year after local public hospitals and 10 private trauma centers received $168 million from the passage of Measure B countywide.

The coalition considered a similar ballot measure last year, but did not go forward after polling indicated it would lose. This time, though, nearly two thirds of those polled supported it.

Focus groups indicated the new support is related to losses in jobs and health coverage, said Jim Lott, executive vice president of the Healthcare Association of Southern California, a hospital Wade association.

“With the increasing angst that middle class workers are feeling about the security of their health insurance, the idea of having emergency services available has become much more important,” Lott said.

The coalition says losses have shuttered dozens of emergency rooms over the last few years, as more uninsured patients seek care. But a recent study also showed that the losses are more than made up by revenues generated when ER patients are admitted to hospitals.

Funding, which would also go to other providders of indigent care, would come from increasing the 911 surcharge on telephone calls made within California to 3.7 percent from 0.72 percent, with a monthly cap of 50 cents.

Calpers Exit

The feared mass exodus from the Calpers health care system by Southern California cities hasn’t yet materialized.

As of last week, just 16 cities, school districts and other public agencies–two more than last year–had voted to buy their health coverage outside the state retirement system, which is experiencing its fourth consecutive year of double-digit premium increases in 2004.

Calpers sets its rates on a statewide basis, but health care generally cheaper in Southern California than the Bay Area. So more than 100 public agencies from this region have explored leaving the system, though many ultimately will decide not to do so, said benefits consultant Lee Exton.

“People only had two months to make a decision and it came in the middle of the summer,” he said. “It was hard to get the appropriate committees together.”

Public health worker Nancy Halpern Ibrahim headed off to the West Bank and then Damascus, Syria, with her husband and children more than a decade ago to create community health and women’s economic development programs. She didn’t think she’d return with a health promotion program for Los Angeles.

Yet Ibrahim, with a University of California Los Angeles master’s degree in public health, had no sooner stepped back into Los Angeles in 1995 than a friend recruited her to direct community health programs for Esperanza Housing (NCR, Jan. 18, 2002).

“It was the heyday of Bill and Hil,” said Ibrahim, referring to the national health care push attempted by the Clinton White House. In Los Angeles, the community Local Initiatives Support Corporation–encouraged by what it foresaw as a health-initiatives national priority ahead–provided seed money to four local agencies to address access to health care.

Esperanza Housing was one, the only one that did not to push the money into opening “yet another primary care clinic,” said Ibrahim. Instead, under her tutelage, Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, a women’s collective, focused on job creation in the health care field. The collective’s director is energetic Sr. Diane Donaghue, a member of the Sisters of Social Service.

And the promotores (health promoters) program came into being.

What “our community was requesting beyond housing needs,” said Ibrahim, “were remunerative salaries that break the cycle of poverty–the greatest health problem–plus access to health services.” So Esperanza, “based on my work abroad,” said Ibrahim, “developed a program that looked for ways for people to gain employment entree in the health field, while improving their health knowledge for themselves and their families.”

The promotores scheme was simple. Pulling it together was not.

The plan was “audacious but they bought it: to have health sector nonprofit agencies volunteer the training as in-kind support–Well Child Care [offered training in] baby care, California Hospital for cancer, asthma, chronic diabetes; WIC [the federal Women, Infant and Children program] for nutrition, and so on,” she said.

“The argument I made [to the agencies],” continued Ibrahim, “was that these providers were mandated by their own funding to do outreach to the community so that access happened. And that could only occur if there was priming being done at the community level. By promotores.”

The study, by Stony Brook University, interviewed 865 adults, and found even when the question was asked in a different way (how important were different qualities of a job) three-fourths of respondents chose benefits over salary. The results didn’t vary by age, sex or profession, said study author Leonie Huddy, “The results were amazingly uniform; men and women, professional workers and blue collar workers, college graduates and those without a high school diploma, all rated health benefits as an important factor in a job.” The survey didn’t define a higher salary or good health benefits, just asked respondents to think about the trade-off between the two. The study also found anxiety about declining benefits. Almost half said they worried about their health benefits being cut in the coming year, and just under 30% worried about losing them completely. A new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation says people are now paying 48% more out of their pockets for care than they did three years ago, and the cost is going up. A Hewitt survey found 31% of companies said they would consider requiring spouses to take their own employer’s insurance, and 6% of those polled are already doing so. And the 2003 Hay Benefits Report predicts employers will suffer double digit increases again in 2004.