Nursing Positions Give Job Market Shot in Arm

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It’s a good time to be a registered nurse, especially if you like palm trees and sun.

The L.A. metro area led the nation in August job openings for RNs with more than 28,000 vacant positions, according to a report by Sunnyvale job aggregator Simply Hired Inc. The region overall, which includes Los Angeles and Orange counties, had almost 43,000 health care job listings, the second most in the nation.

“Health care comprises a large segment of open positions across the country in general,” said Susan Martindill, Simply Hired’s director of marketing and the author of the report analyzing listings from thousands of job sites. “Los Angeles is the second-largest metro area. It made sense that there are a lot of jobs in health care.”

Other in-demand positions include medical and health services managers, personal-care aides, nursing assistants and licensed vocational nurses.

The report also called out USC, Kaiser Permanente, St. Joseph Health, Providence Health & Services and UCLA Health as L.A. employers with the most open health care jobs.

“If you look at the jobs open it would seem reasonable to speculate that health care jobs are just exploding in numbers, and that would be an overstatement,” said Katherine Bullard, regional chief nursing officer of Providence Health & Services Southern California. “But certainly we have seen increased demand for the services that our organization provides at all levels.”

That increased need for health care has been generated partly by pent-up demand from newly insured patients courtesy of the Affordable Care Act. And it’s collided with a coterie of registered nurses who delayed retirement during the recession and now are finally cutting back hours or leaving the workforce, Bullard explained.

“While we have a fairly rich supply of newly graduated, newly licensed nurses in California … one can’t staff an entire unit or hospital with all newly graduated nurses and maintain a balance of more experienced ones,” she said. “The market is always competitive for registered nurses with experience.”

That increasingly squeezed pool has boosted salaries for contract staff.

“As the supply shrinks and demand grows, the rates go up,” Bullard said.

She noted two other factors that have increased demand for nurses: The need for licensed vocational nurses and other support roles has increased as care has shifted out of hospitals into other settings, such as long term and home care; and nurse engagement with consumers continues to grow as more providers adopt new models, such as accountable-care organizations, that assume more responsibility for the total well-being of patients.

Interactive Design

Whether they’re building research labs or medical schools, CO Architects has seen an increased desire for more open and interactive spaces.

The Mid-Wilshire firm, which primarily serves an array of medical industry clients, recently saw its latest interactive designs realized in Loyola Marymount University’s newly opened life sciences building. One unique aspect: constructing normally opaque labs with glass walls for a concept called “science on display.”

“It allows people passing through the building, even if they aren’t science majors, to see what’s going on,” said CO Principal James Simeo, who worked on the project. “It provides for a lot of cross-pollination between different departments such as chemistry and biology. A huge tenet of this building was to decentralize … the departments.”

In medical school design, CO has developed a practice creating simulation rooms that mimic real-life situations in hospital labor-and-delivery settings and operating and emergency rooms. High-tech mannequins that respond like real people are used to practice medical procedures in these simulation settings. But they’ve also become a space for students in different health disciplines to interact with one another.

“These simulation spaces, they’re bringing together all the students in the various professions that will work together in real life,” said Simeo, who’s firm sees the full spectrum of these trends playing out while designing research and education institutions as well as the hospitals students will ultimately work in and where research ends up. “Doctors aren’t being trained in a silo anymore, nor are nurses, nor physical therapists. They’re all training together and learning in the school environment to work with each other.”

Checkups

NantOmics, a molecular diagnostic company under billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Culver City-based NantWorks umbrella of health care firms, bought the balance of shares it did not already control in OncoPlex Diagnostics, a Rockville, Md., clinical lab that provides comprehensive profiling services of patients’ tumors. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. … Westwood biopharmaceutical firm Puma Biotechnology Inc. has appointed Frank Zavrl to its board in the wake of Thomas R. Malley’s resignation. Zavrl previously specialized in biotech investments as a partner at Adage Capital Management, a Boston hedge fund with a significant position in Puma. … Monrovia implantable lens maker Staar Surgical Co. has appointed William P. Wall to its board. … Altadena therapeutic software developer Blue Marble Game Co. has named Melanie Hardin senior adviser.

Staff reporter Marni Usheroff can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 229.

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