Health care hiring accelerates at end of 2010

Numbers tracking job creation in the health care industry finished 2010 on a positive note.

Health care added 35,700 jobs in December 2010, according to preliminary data released Jan. 7 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. This included 3,300 positions in physician offices and 8,000 in hospitals. The overall unemployment rate fell from 9.8% to 9.4%, and 103,000 jobs were created in the economy. Health care joined leisure and hospitality as the only industries to add a significant number of positions.

The annual totals for job creation in the health care industry are higher for 2010 than for 2009. About 1.1 million jobs were created in the economy during the past year, with 265,800 in health care. Health care added 215,300 jobs in 2009.

Hospitals added 50,100 jobs in 2010, compared with 25,700 in 2009. Annual numbers for physician offices, however, were softer. About 28,700 jobs were added to physician offices in 2010, but 44,000 were created in 2009.

Officials who track these numbers suspect that hospitals may have cut staff in response to the economic downturn as much as possible without affecting patient care, and now have to add some positions. Job creation may be more muted in physician offices because of Medicare reimbursement uncertainty during the past year. In December 2010, President Obama signed into law a one-year freeze on Medicare pay, reversing a 25% cut due to begin Jan. 1 -- the fifth law he signed in 2010 to avert Medicare cuts. In addition, many practices are consolidating or joining hospitals and large health systems.

"There's not a whole lot more hospitals can cut without impacting quality," said David Cherner, MPH, managing partner of Health Workforce Solutions in San Francisco. "The job trends in physician offices have to do with the clinical integration that is going on right now, but we continue to be very bullish on health care hiring over the medium term."

The BLS also revised some recently released numbers. A total of 1,200 positions were created in physician offices in November 2010, rather than the originally reported loss of 500. An additional 4,700 were created in October 2010. This number was initially reported to be 2,700.

The statistics for hospitals were changed. The 8,000 originally reported for November 2010 was cut to 7,700. The October number of 5,100 new jobs was increased to 5,900.

Although there was significant job creation in the final months of last year, job advertising was flat, according to a report from the Conference Board released Jan. 5. The number of listings for health care practitioners and technical workers, a category that includes physicians, grew by 1,600, from 555,400 to 557,000 in December 2010. Listings for these types of jobs grew by 12,400 in November and 26,800 in October of last year.

Experts suspect that this may be due to an end-of-year holiday lull rather than portending any long-term trend.