Education For A Lifetime Of Help
Nurses are concerned with the idea of their assistants reporting to a doctor "because performing patient care is a nursing responsibility. GMT students receive 44 hours of college credit but must be high school graduates and 18 years of age or older. Also, they are required to pass an entrance exam for medical assistant education.
Recently, HCA's Parkview/West Side Hospital and Donelson Hospital expressed interest in the program, Meadows says. Other cities offering the program are Memphis, Tallahassee, Fla., and Houston.
Nurses should have not trouble finding work. But it may be tough going for meter readers, electronics assemblers and farm workers. Job opportunities will be mainly in areas that require considerable medical assistant education and training, according to a University of Georgia study.
Jeffrey M. Humphreys, director of economic forecasting at Georgia's Selig Center for Economic Growth and author of the study, said the overall economic expansion of the '90s concealed occupational trends now evident in the current recession. "A rising tide tended to obscure such trends, encouraging some to pursue occupations that are unlikely to provide good opportunities over the long term," Humphreys said Tuesday from his Athens office. "Some of our choices will become more important now because we will have slow growth through the middle of the decade." Demographic changes and technological advances are the major influences on the job market, and the study found the best opportunities are related to continued growth in the service sector. "Basically we were an agrarian economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, then we became an industrial society," Hunphreys said. "Now, for the last few decades, we've become a service economy. It's a natural evolution. "If there is another stage, it will be created and defined by emerging technology, and we don't know what that will be." Humphreys predicts overall annual employment growth in the 1990s to be 1.2 percent, with the most robust growth coming in executive, administrative, managerial, professional specialty and technical occupations. He predicted below-average growth or losses in administrative support, clerical, production, craft, repair, operator, fabricator, agriculture and forestry jobs. "Virtually all of the new jobs will be in service production rather than in goods production," Humphreys said. The strongest field, according to Humphreys' study, is that of medical assistants, which should experience 4.5 percent annual job growth during the '90s. Aging baby boomers will need more health care as they enter middle age, he said, and the rapidly expanding elderly population will create a huge demand for medical care.
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