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| The number of health care professionals is decreasing while the need for them is on the rise. | |
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A new report on America’s health care workforce suggests conditions are ripe for a “perfect storm” marked by a rapidly increasing need for care and dwindling supply of available health professionals.
“There is greater awareness today of the health challenges that are created by our aging population,” said report co-editor Antonio Furino, Ph.D., professor and director of the Center for Health Economics and Policy and the Regional Center for Health Workforce Studies at the Health Science Center. The other co-editor is Toni P. Miles, M.D., Ph.D., professor of family and geriatric medicine at the University of Louisville and formerly of the Health Science Center. The report, titled “Aging Health Care Workforce Issues,” appears in the 2005 Annual Review of Gerontology and Geriatrics.
Health expenditures will more than double by 2008, and the elderly 13 percent of the population will account for one-third of the expenditures, Dr. Furino said. The population of elderly minorities will increase fourfold over the next 50 years and the multiple chronic conditions of the aging population will require more and interdisciplinary care.
“Yet, not many of us seem to be aware that combining current demographic trends with the decreasing number of health care workers create the preconditions of what has been called the ‘perfect storm’ – the convergence of greater needs with the aging and the proportional decrease of the health workforce,” Dr. Furino said.
In her introduction to the volume, Dr. Miles urged readers to think globally but act locally. Hospital administrators, public health officials and university training program directors need to view their problem in finding qualified nurses, technicians and pharmacists, and teachers of those professions, as a symptom of a global trend, not as a local issue. “Developing responses to any one of these problems will require a commitment of economic resources and political will at the city, county, state and regional levels,” Dr. Miles said.
Dr. Furino said the report will prompt planning to address the issues. “I was fortunate to know a geriatrician of the caliber of Dr. Miles and a great publisher with the vision and the motivation to inform decision makers and the public about this perfect storm,” he said.
Contact:
Will SansomPhone: (210) 567-2579
E-mail:
sansom@uthscsa.edu
