Volume 3,
No.4
Winter 1997
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Strong in Illinois
Skills Employers Seek, Or Who Will Be the Hot Workers of The 21st Century
HEALTH CARE STRONG IN ILLINOIS
But Therapists Prepare for Change
By: Scott Huelskamp
This article first appeared in the June 1997 issue of Advance for Directors in Rehabilitation and is reprinted here with the permission of Merion Publications. The author used Occupational Projections data provided by the Illinois Department of Employment Security's Economic Information and Analysis Division, publishers of the Illinois Labor Market Review. We hope it will be of interest to all our readers, especially to those in health care industries and all the rehabilitation centers and counselors who subscribe to the ILMR.
If you're looking for culture in the Windy City, try the Museum of Natural History. If you're an outdoors person, Lake Michigan offers its waves, while professional sports downtown come in many shapes and sizes, from Michael Jordan to Wrigley Field.
And anyone curious about Illinois' economic prospects for rehab medicine also need look no further than the Chicagoland area, in the northeastern part of the state. Sixtyfour percent of the state's therapists are clustered in a metropolis bolstered by three major rehabilitation facilities and dozens of smaller quality care facilities. Of Illinois' approximately 13,780 physical therapists, occupational therapists, recreational therapists and speech-language pathologists/audiologists, 8,890 do business in the big city according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security, Economic Information and Analysis Division. Of that total, physical therapists account for 2,870 and occupational therapists total another 1,690. In addition, those areas are among the top 50 fastest growing occupations in Illinois.
"The old saying that
when you can't get a job anywhere else, you can get a job in Chicago,
still holds," says Rick Rausch, PT, MBA, APTA chapter president and
owner of Rehabilitation Services Network in Chicago. "There has been
no significant decrease in the level of demand for therapists. The practice
settings have changed, but the demand is still strong."
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As a whole, the therapy field is expected to balloon 41.5 percent. Having hospitals such as the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), Marianjoy Rehabilitation Center and Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital certainly helps.
RIC was rated one of the top rehab centers for treating spinal cord, brain injury, and stroke in U.S. News & World Report's "1996 America's Best Hospitals" list.
Expected growth totals are part of the rehab field's diversity in the Land of Lincoln. "The rehab field's diversity in the Land of Lincoln. "The rehab field in Illinois is still very fragmented, " says Rausch. "There has been some consolidation of private practitioners and some hospital rehab departments are working together, but there is not one big player."
However, the metro area, with nearly seven million people, is also receiving the focus of managed care, says Rausch. "Managed care has not touched many parts of the state....There's not much penetration outside the metro are because [managed care organizations] can't justify the cost. But they are slowly working their way out to the suburbs."
As the therapy population grows in Illinois, so too must industry supervision and an understanding of authority delegation issues, cautions Rausch. Competition breeds lower costs and therapists vie for greater patient bases.
Says Rausch: "As changes occur more rapidly, we must make sure we still provide appropriate care and support staff...As we are poised for expected changes, people are scrambling for a way to do things creatively, from the business standpoint rather than the clinical standpoint."
Across the state, employment figures are solid. In January 1997, unemployment in Illinois fell to 5 percent, its lowest level in 19 months, and well below the 5.4 national average, according to the Illinois Department of Employment Security statistics. In the diverse services sector, 53,000 new jobs were reported, a 3.4 percent increase from January 1996. Included in that increase were business services, such as temporary office workers (20,000), engineering and management (6,200), amusement and recreation (4,800), and social services (2,800).
In the last year, the labor force has grown by 35,254 to more than 6.1 million, according to IDES. "Illinois is striding a healthy economic course marked by strong employment, consistently low unemployment and steady job growth, and all of these individual indicators have remained at a near-constant level for more than a year," says IDES director Lynn Q. Doherty in a news release.
Health services are expected to increase because people are more health conscious. And baby boomers, now in their 50s, will be close to retirement in 10 years. "The need for health services is going to mushroom because of that [aging population]. That, to a large extent, is what's driving the health care industry," says Bob Bernacchi, an economist at the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
Illinois employment figures prove that point, says Bernacchi. The number of residents 65 and over is projected to increase from 1.5 million in 1995 to 1.7 in the year 2000, with an additional increase between the ages of 45-64 from 2.1 to 2.7 over that span.
Those increases directly correlate to Illinois' projected explosion in the home health arena by 141 percent, from 14,812 in 1992 to 35,713 in 2005, states Bernacchi. Nationally, home health workers are expected to increase their numbers 120 percent.
In 1990, about 4,000 home health workers were employed in Illinois, says Bernacchi. "It's a level that's already high, and it will keep getting higher," he added. "Where else would these older people be helped?"