Low Wages During The Health Care Industry

Pocahontas Memorial Hospital is a rural county hospital located in Buckeye, West Virginia meant to be the first choice in integrated healthcare for the community they are serving (Pocahontas Memorial Hospital, 2014). Due to the limited amount of hospital beds and rural status of the community that it is serving, a market analysis is needed to determine the true needs of the community. Therefore, the market analysis will ensure that the small amount of money they have will go to the correct products, services, and ventures that are truly needed.

(OOH) Possible local employers include Select Specialty Hospital, a long term acute care hospital, and CareTenders, a member of Almost Family which is a leading provider of home health nursing, rehabilitation and personal care services.

Currently, there is still a large shortage of primary care practitioners in the United States. The margin between available providers and those in need continues to grow. Many people without proper access to care have to delay seeking help for what ails them ("Health Wanted," 2012). Glicken & Miller (2013) state that approximately 16,000 primary care providers would be necessary to meet the existing demand. Rural communities would represent the area of greatest need followed closely by low-income urban areas. The number of underserved individuals is estimated to have reached fifty-seven million. This demand will only increase, as 52,000 primary care providers are expected to be needed by the year 2025 (Glicken & Miller, 2013, p.1883-1889).

Americans will have insurance coverage. The US has an unequal distribution of the primary care, thus; the rural areas have been left with only few physicians. Many physicians prefer practicing in urban areas because of the lucrative advantage, better technology or demographic preference. Many sources including Green et al, of Anita Phigpen Perry School of nursing confirms that the reason for the shortage of physicians in the rural areas is due to the tendency of people in the rural areas being poorer, sicker and older . This segment of people tends to be uninsured, and physicians are attracted to urban and suburb areas where revenues are. Today with the ACA policies, people in the underserved area have better access to physicians, although the shortage persists. The US Department of Health and Human Services, states that to help strengthen access to the primary care workforce, the Affordable Care Act invests in health work force training, including: a $ 1.5 billion investment in National Health Service Corps Scholarship and loan repayment programs and $ 230 million over five years to primarily train medical residents in community-bases. However, do we have enough experts?

Pocahontas County is a rural area located in the southeast region of West Virginia, spanning 942 square miles. The scenic area serves as the site of the head waters for eight rivers: Cherry River, Cranberry River, Elk River, Ganley River, Greenbriar River, Tygart Valley River, Williams River, and Shaver Fork of the Cheat River and consists of 10 scattered small towns. As with other rural communities across the United States, Pocahontas Country suffers from a depressed local economy, substantial barriers to health care access, and difficulty in attracting health professionals. A market analysis of both the rural community and some options that may be used to attract health professionals to Pocahontas Memorial Hospital offers some proposed relief to the dampened healthcare outlook.

Competition in the home health field is intense, particularly in rural areas, where the need for services is in more demand. Because services are expensive to provide, it is critical for agencies to generate a volume of visits sufficient to cover fixed expenses plus make a small profit. Competition is primarily between another company Care One, Inc., a multicounty operation that has been established in the area for well over 10 years. AHHS surpassed them in total number of visits after its second year of operation and has been progressively growing. Many of the physicians in the area, however, continue to use Care One, and Care One receives more referrals from the local hospitals than AHHS. Currently AHHS has 32 employees, including 15 registered nurses, 8 nursing aides, 1 physical therapist, I speech language therapist, and 7 administrative staff.

Home healthcare is an extremely competitive industry. According to Harris William&Co Home Health Market report, home healthcare is a 40-billion-dollar industry and it is still growing. One of the reason is home healthcare is less expensive than any other form of care, especially inpatient hospitalization, which patients are required to stay in the hospital for a day or more. Home healthcare’s compelling cost-saving opportunities increases the demand in the industry. Furthermore, population of people over 65 years old is expected to increase more than 40 percent by 2020, so home healthcare industry will continue to grow.

If one specific job entitles healthcare while others do not, this means people are more likely to stay with that job and not move to another position, [3].

According to Ingols and Brem (as cited in Swayne, Duncan, and Ginter, 2006), Massachusetts is known across the world for computer technology, education, and health care. In the words of the authors, Massachusetts' "health care expenditures per capita were between 27 and 29 percent higher than the national average from 1990 to 2000." At the time, there was a general consensus that Boston's health care was relatively expensive as a result of the region's cutting edge and high quality services (Ingols and Brem, 2006). During the 1990s, a number of healthcare insurance plans at the national level chose to merge in an attempt to further enhance their ability to compete effectively. This trend according to Ingols and Brem (as cited in Swayne, Duncan, and Ginter, 2006) was also replicated in Massachusetts where the eventual formation of three large competitors had far-reaching consequences. One consequence of the increasing power of these three formations in the marketplace was reduced payments.

Health care in Arkansas is severely limited, but a few changes in the spending of the state’s funding could improve the quality and quantity of health facilities around the state. Making Arkansas’ general public more aware of the disparities involving health care within the state could open the door for filling the needed positions, as Arkansas also has a significant unemployment rate. Robert Bowman, leading researcher in rural medical education, is quoted as saying, “It is no longer about establishing family medicine as a discipline... It is about the kind of health care delivered in the United States and our role in shaping the caregiver that will best serve our patients. This is no easy task because the general awareness of these issues is low” (par. 19). It would be much easier to shift federal spending rather than trying to

Rural Americans depend on their community hospitals as critical component of the area’s economic and social material. These hospitals are usually the largest or second largest employer in the community, and often stand alone in their ability to offer highly-skilled jobs. According to, The Opportunities and Challenges for Rural Hospitals in an Era of Health Reform; “For every job in a rural community, between 0.77 and 0.3 less jobs are created in the local economy, spurred by the spending of either

The first trend that Prime Time Healthcare was able to take advantage of was the increased demand for skilled labor in low-populated areas in North Dakota and Montana due to the shale oil boom (Spencer & Dries, 2014). This initial success in recruiting skilled talent led to the perfection of several processes and the beginning of key relationships with rural healthcare providers (Spencer & Dries, 2014). Despite recent success, rural demand for skilled labor remains the most important value driver for current and future business (Spencer & Dries, 2014).

The overall health care industry has undergone fundamental change over the last decade. Most of the changes have occurred within the underlying business operation of the healthcare industry. Legislation in particular has had a profound impact on the health care industry. First, due to the Affordable Care Act of 2010, the nursing profession is undergoing a fundamental shift in regards to the patient experience. The U.S. health care system is now shifting the focus from acute and specialty care to that of primary care which requires a shift in business operations. Also, due primarily to that aging of the baby boomer generation, the need for primary car overall is shifting and will be needed heavily in the future. The last 10 years in particular has seen an increasing influx of retiring baby boomers that subsequently need care. A positive impact on the ACA legislation is that more individuals are now insured. As such, the need for primary care will also increase over subsequent years, particular within the minority population. This patient centric approach will require more care predicated on specific communities in a seamless manner. Furthermore, primary care physicians will be in high demand over the coming years.

I agree Hospitals, Long-term care and mental health systems play respective roles in the health community. The two hospital that we have in Jackson is very viable for our area because most of the smaller rural county have closed their hospital. These closures affect not only the patients that depend on the hospitals but also the economy in many rural areas (Balasubramanian, & Jones, 2016). Many factors come into play when a hospital decides to shut off services. Although influencing reasons may vary, hospital closures are likely to be caused by financial shortfalls. In the USA recently, several rural hospitals have closed and many are on the verge of closing. The recent changes in the healthcare industry due to the new reforms are

Columbus Regional Health (n.d.) serves 10 counties in Southeast Indiana. The demographics include a predominantly Caucasian population of approximately 300,000 people (Economic Opportunities through Education by 2015, n.d.). In southeastern Indiana, about 140,000 individuals have employment, and 15% of them, who are over the age of 24, have a bachelor’s degree (Economic Opportunities through Education by 2015, n.d.). Approximately 30% of the high-school students drop out in this mainly rural area with a flat population growth (Economic Opportunities through Education by 2015, n.d.).