If you are a healthcare worker, or even a job seeker in the healthcare industry, you most likely have many reasons to be thankful this holiday season. Here are a few reasons to give thanks if you are a healthcare professional or a healthcare job seeker:
You have a job, or you will have one soon: If you are a healthcare professional, the odds that you are unemployed are much lower than if you work in another industry. While the nation's unemployment rate is 7.9 percent, unemployment in the healthcare industry is currently 5.5 percent. Healthcare is hiring, and has continued to add jobs, even throughout the recession and recovery of the past few years.
Working in healthcare offers many rewards: Working in healthcare is not just a job. It's a career, even a calling. As a healthcare professional, you are making a significant impact in the lives of others each day you go to work.
Healthcare reform, population growth, and life expectancy: This "trifecta" guarantees continued growth in demand for your services as a healthcare professional.
Technology: Electronic medical record technology is rapidly making your job faster, easier, more mobile, more accurate, and, if you are a healthcare IT professional, it's also making you more valuable to the job market. Medical devices and equipment, as well as computer software continue to advance the practice of medicine and drive up demand for new procedures, new skills, techniques, and specialists.
Patients: Patients are the reason we are all here, working in the healthcare industry in some capacity - they are the end user of all of our efforts and labor as a healthcare professional. Patients make the stress and challenges of working in healthcare worthwhile.
Social media: Social media is allowing medical professionals to connect, share, educate, and consult with each other and with the patient population as they've never been able to before.
What would you add to the list? As a healthcare professional, what makes you feel thankful this year?