Workforce Overview

The largest labor force in the United States is the health care labor force and represents more than 3% of the total labor force. There are many different occupations and workplaces in health care that a lot of people don’t think about. Many people think about physicians, nurses and occupations along that line when they think about health care occupations, but there are also pharmacists, massage therapists, dieticians, midwives, and many more. Health care employees are not just employed at hospitals and clinics; they may work for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, colleges, and various other places. The list of health care occupations and places where health care workers are employed is constantly expanding and adding new employees and places as technology changes and grows. New and more complicated technology is being invented and put to use, so more technicians are needed to train individuals on how to operate them.

One of the main problems with the workforce is that it is not distributed evenly throughout the country. There are many people that are part of the health care industry and a lot of them reside in urban areas because there are more opportunities to advance their careers and usually more money available. This causes a lot of rural areas to be deficient in the number of medical facilities that are available for the public. The government has looked at several ways to persuade physicians and other health care professionals to relocate to rural areas. One of them is the National Health Service Corps (NHSC), which makes scholarships available to students that commit to working in an underserved area. Through more health care reforms more programs like NHCS can be possible and more underserved areas of our country can get the medical they need and deserve.

For a more complete list of health care occupations go to this website and look at the various other positions in the health care industry:

http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/education-careers/careers-health-care/directory.shtml

For more information on the geographic maldistribution of physicians look at this research article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1361233/#__secid158484

For more information on National Health Service Corps go to this website: http://nhsc.hrsa.gov/