Recovery: It was a tough year for healthcare practitioners but a light is shining at the end of the tunnel

Recovery:

It was a tough year for healthcare practitioners but a light is shining at the end of the tunnel

Never in recent memory has the health sector proved itself so consequential for the rest of society as it did in 2020-21. The COVID-19 pandemic reminded everybody of the need to have an effective, reliable and accessible healthcare sector. The need for innovative medicine and a strong research sector was made readily apparent to a world put on pause until a vaccine could be devised and distributed.

The pandemic was also able to influence the field of health in ways less obviously related to COVID-19. The rise of telehealth, for instance, was a by-product of the stay-at-home orders and over-capacitated hospitals but it looks like remote medicine will continue to be a driving force in the health sector.

South Jersey was able to respond to these challenges with commendable aplomb throughout 2020 and the first half of 2021. A lot of its success can be traced to the fact that New Jerseyans enjoy more coverage on average than elsewhere in the country.

That said, the challenges posed by the pandemic were not light and there are areas of the industry that are yet to recover, though their prospects look bright moving forward.

More importantly for its future, the region is fast becoming a leading area in the country for the health sector. The number of people employed in health continues to rise and it continues to be a larger proportion of the economy.

Landscape Healthcare is big business in New Jersey. The numbers speak for themselves: nearly 487,580 people are employed in 22,645 healthcare establishments, and a third of these jobs can be found in hospitals (many of the rest are in smaller healthcare offices). Businesses in the sector accounted for over $44 billion of the state’s GDP in 2019, which was about 7.9% of all output.

The growth over the last decades has been astronomical: from 1990 to 2019, the healthcare sector has increased by 231,700 jobs — the only industry in the state to add jobs for every single one of those years — and, in that time, it has increased its share of those jobholding from 7.5% in 1990 to 12% in 2019, according to the New Jersey’s Health Care Industry Cluster report prepared by the New Jersey Department of Labor & Workforce Development’s Office of Research & Information for 2021-2021. This makes the health sector a driving force of employment in the area. ( )