What will health care and health care employment look like in the next decade or two? Where there is a change, there is an opportunity, including opportunity for jobs. Thousands of health care jobs are created each month. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that jobs in health care should grow 47 percent overall by the year 2007. Healthcare jobs will grow twice as fast as the average for all industries.
The health field offers a vast array of opportunities. If you like working with your hands, there are opportunities as a biomedical equipment technician or a dental technician, or a prosthetist, just to name a few. If understanding and working with machines is to your liking, then there are opportunities to work as radiographer (x-ray technician), respiratory therapist or as an EKG (electrocardiograph) or EEG (electroencephalograph) technician. Or, are you more inclined toward the arts or photography? If so, then the specialties of dance, art or music therapy are available. If you want to work directly with people every day, then perhaps nursing, social work, or medicine would be in your future. |
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The demand for health care service workers continues. The reasons for this need are rooted in the American system of delivering health care:
- Our citizens have become accustomed to and have learned to expect the very best in health care;
- There tends to be disproportions in the health care delivered (ex, infant mortality continues to be high among many minority groups);
- Our population continues to expand and shift, putting a heavy load on certain health services;
- Medical research continues to race on relentlessly, setting high standards for all in the profession; and
- With the staggering costs of medical care continuing and taking a larger bite out of our country's budget, it becomes necessary to target the use of resources more highly
The single most pressing issue now facing health person-power is whether there is an appropriate supply of the right kind of health professionals and paraprofessionals to meet our needs.
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