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Upper-level hiring in health care looks strong
People looking for executive and professional positions in the health care field should have little trouble finding a job, according to a recent hiring survey conducted by search and recruitment firm Management Recruiters International Inc. (MRI) of Cleveland.
The survey reported that 54.3% of the health care executives with responsibility for hiring said they plan to increase their staffs in the first half of this year, up 8.5 percentage points from the 45.8% level of the second half of 2000. Another 42.5% of those surveyed said they plan to maintain current staff size, up 10.3 points from second-half 2000, while only 3.2% plan staff decreases, which is a decline of 18.8 points from last year’s second half.
Across all industries, 58.8% of hiring executives projected new hires during the current half, 35.2% plan to maintain current levels, and 5.9% plan decreases.
For more information, see MRI’s web site: www.BrilliantPeople.com.
Cancer patients survive longer with home care
A study in the December Journal of the American Geriatrics Society found that elderly cancer patients who received home care from advanced practice nurses lived an average of seven months longer than patients who received standard care. The four-year study was conducted at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing from 1992 to 1996 and followed 375 elderly patients newly discharged from the hospital after cancer surgery.
Some patients received standard care while an experimental group received three home visits and five telephone contacts with an advanced practice nurse, who also educated family members about caregiving. Advanced practice nurses are specially trained registered nurses, usually holding master’s degrees, who can provide such highly skilled care as medication prescription and physical examinations.
Nurse averted complications
The study focused on elderly patients, who are more likely to experience postoperative complications. This problem is exacerbated by a trend to discharge patients rapidly after surgery. The interventions of the advanced practice nurse served to avert or address complications rapidly. In contrast, some patients in the standard care group died prematurely from surgical complications, such as infections.
The authors speculate that survival may also have been enhanced in the experimental group by the psychosocial support that nurses gave patients and families. The findings were especially significant because the patients in the group who received the special nursing care tended to be in later stages of their cancer than the group that received standard care. The assumption made by the researchers would be that these later-stage patients would die sooner, but the reverse happened.
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