From a recruitment perspective, for health services to stay relevant and cutting edge in order to continue to provide high quality care outcomes, a new pool of professionals will be required within this sector across five key areas of growth over the next five years.
1. Population Health
We’ve certainly witnessed health equity becoming one of the biggest focus areas for public, private and community health service providers. Population health professionals bring their expertise in cultural competence, diversity, and inclusion to decrease health disparities across our communities and bring emotional, mental and physical health services to remote areas across Australia.
What does that mean for recruitment?
Organisations in the public, private and community health care sector will see the increase in demand for epidemiologists, health promotion coordinators and managers, community engagement specialists, public health policy analysts, biostatisticians, health educators and researchers (particularly covering global public health and health prevention), health informaticians, environmental health scientists, disease prevention and control specialists, and community health workers.
2. Telehealth & Digital Transformation
One of the greatest innovations that came out of the pandemic was the implementation of telehealth consultations. There are multiple complex digital health transformation projects being undertaken by health services and government health departments across the country to digitise patient information records, increase patient access to their personal health information, and the necessary IT infrastructure being developed to share patient records between health services. We anticipate that digital transformation will continue to be an area of growth and development in the health sector.
What does that mean for recruitment?
The increase in demand for virtual care may likely create the need for more remote patient monitoring (RPM) technicians, online dedicated GPs and RNs, allied health professionals and medical support staff, digital health project managers, virtual care managers and executives, interoperability and software integration specialists, digital health innovation managers, data analysts, regulatory and compliance specialists, change management professionals, user experience designers, health ICT specialists, digital health technology leads, digital health software engineers/developers, and cyber security professionals.
3. Aged Care
According to the Bureau of Statistics, 20% of the Australian population will have reached retirement age in the next 7 years which is a 4% increase to the current rate. This brings with it its challenges but also great opportunity to improve the quality of health for our aging population.
What does that mean for recruitment?
The demand for aged care nurses and allied health professionals will always be prevalent in this sector, however we will see the increase in demand for professionals such as activity coordinators, recreation therapists, care coordinators, social workers, mental health professionals, dementia care specialists and home care workers.
4. Specialist roles influenced by AI & Machine Learning
The use of artificial intelligence will be an ever expanding industry with its capabilities in healthcare proving useful for predicting patient outcomes, improving diagnostics and creating efficiencies on an administrative and operational level.
What does that mean for recruitment?
The roles that will be in more demand are natural language processing (NLP) specialists, healthcare ethicists, healthcare data analysts, medical image specialists, data scientists, and machine learning engineers.
5. Genomics
The health sector is already seeing the benefits of genomic science through its ability to tailor patient treatments, identify genetic predispositions to certain illnesses, target therapies for conditions that are difficult to treat, prevent diseases, and inform drug development.
What does that mean for recruitment?
We anticipate that there will be an increase in demand for professionals such as genomic research scientists, genetic counsellors, genomic technicians, bioinformaticians, and clinical & non-clinical geneticists over the next few years.
This article was originally published at www.johnsonrecruitment.com.au
