Health Care Outside the Box
The world of health care extends beyond the realm of hospitals, clinics, and practitioners' offices. It includes all of the educational institutions, medical libraries, pharmaceutical companies, bioengineering firms, and medical publishers.
The Rest of the Health Care
Industry Health insurance companies employ nurses, therapists, and physicians to assist in reviewing as well as authorizing care. Financial services and management companies, whether in-house or out-sourced, support such things as human resources, medical billing, medical coding, and accounts receivable functions for both small practices and large corporations throughout the medical field.
Nurses, doctors, dentists, and others become educators to teach new students how to become health care professionals. Scientists develop new technology to improve diagnostics and treatment modalities.
Not all of these workers are included in the statistics of health care workers. Facilities also hire food service workers, security personnel, janitorial services, and numerous administrative support personnel to run the day-to-day operations of their facilities and ensure clean and safe environments for patients as well as health care professionals. Many of these workers further their education and eventually become full-fledged members of the health care team as doctors, nurses, and other practitioners.
Have Degree, Will Travel?
There is a romantic notion that the exciting and dramatic hospital setting portrayed on shows such as
ssential
Not every health care issue requires highly specialized modalities, and not every health care worker desires to work in a high-stress environment. Health care offers opportunities to meet the diverse needs of the public as well as the workforce. Sometimes the less-desirable locations will offer you interesting and creative incentives.
Another notion is that if the patient requires specialized care he'll only get good care — and possibly be cured — if he travels to a large medical facility such as the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins. While these are, of course, top-notch facilities, they are not the only places where patients can receive superior medical diagnosis and treatment. They do create situations for the less-desirable areas to compete for health care professionals. Geographically, wherever people live there will always be a need for health care, but because of this strong competition, the care is not always adequate.
