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City & State New York

New York City’s public hospitals, which form a critical safety net for many low-income residents, are facing a shortage of doctors who work in primary care, the day-to-day physicians with whom patients make first contact, such as those in family practice, pediatrics and internal medicine.

There is no shortage of primary care doctors in the state as a whole, according to a 2018 report from the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the University at Albany. But New York’s doctors are poorly distributed, with almost a third of the state’s population living in a federally designated health professional shortage area – including many in poorer areas of New York City, such as East New York, Brownsville and Washington Heights.

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Pew Trusts

A strong research base finds that dental sealants are highly effective in preventing tooth decay. Sealants can reduce the risk of decay in permanent molars—the teeth most prone to cavities—by 80 percent in the first two years after application and continue to be effective after more than four years.

Yet most low-income children—who are least likely to receive routine dental care—lack sealants. According to the most recent data, 61 percent of low-income 6- to 11-year-olds (6.5 million) lacked sealants.2 A recent study found that if all 6.5 million low-income children who lacked sealants were to receive them, it would prevent 3.4 million cavities over four years.3 With this strong evidence of sealants’ effectiveness, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Association of State and Territorial Dental Directors, the American Association of Public Health Dentistry, and numerous other health organizations recommend sealant programs in schools, especially as an optimal location to provide low-income children with preventive care.4 Yet a 2015 Pew report found that such programs are in fewer than half of high-need schools in 39 states…

…State practice acts might include requirements that dentists examine children before a hygienist can seal their teeth in school, that dentists be present while a hygienist performs this service, or that private dentists cannot employ hygienists working in schools. They may also include rules that set very low limits on the numbers of school-based hygienists that any one dentist can supervise. In describing dental hygiene scope of practice rules, a 2016 report from the national Oral Health Workforce Research Center stated, “State-based regulatory constraints for dental hygienists may impede access to care as much as the economic and logistical barriers that are known to prevent some patients from obtaining oral health services.”5 In more recent research, the center found that a “more autonomous dental hygienist scope of practice had a positive and significant association with population oral health in both 2001 and 2014.”

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ASPPH

The Center for Health Workforce Studies (CHWS) at the University at Albany School of Public Health recently announced the release of the New York State Health Workforce Planning Data Guide. The new website is an interactive, user-friendly tool that applies visualization techniques to data on health care in New York, including its workforce.

The data guide allows for comparisons by region or by county, and illustrates changes over time.

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The Times Telegram

The Bassett Healthcare Network is cutting through distance and backed-up appointment books to get quick care for children who need mental health treatment…

…Bassett is likely part of a trend toward both telemedicine and telepsychiatry in particular, said Jean Moore, director of the Center for Health Workforce Studies.

“I think there is increasing interest in the use of telehealth for psychiatry services because it’s just so difficult to attract psychiatrists to many parts of the state,” she said.

And child psychiatrists are the rarest of mental-health providers in rural areas, she said. Bennett, for example, is the only full-time child psychiatrist accepting Medicaid patients in Otsego County, and some counties don’t have any.

The value of telemedicine is not limited to psychiatry, though, as other fields struggle to make better use of the workforce, Moore said. She mentioned as examples another Bassett telemedicine program that monitors high-risk patients in their homes, a teledentistry program that does a lot of the prep work before an in-person visit, and a program through which pediatricians can assess children in day care.

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Utica Observer-Dispatch

The Bassett Healthcare Network is cutting through distance and backed-up appointment books to get quick care for children who need mental health treatment…

…Bassett is likely part of a trend toward both telemedicine and telepsychiatry in particular, said Jean Moore, director of the Center for Health Workforce Studies.

“I think there is increasing interest in the use of telehealth for psychiatry services because it’s just so difficult to attract psychiatrists to many parts of the state,” she said.

And child psychiatrists are the rarest of mental-health providers in rural areas, she said. Bennett, for example, is the only full-time child psychiatrist accepting Medicaid patients in Otsego County, and some counties don’t have any.

The value of telemedicine is not limited to psychiatry, though, as other fields struggle to make better use of the workforce, Moore said. She mentioned as examples another Bassett telemedicine program that monitors high-risk patients in their homes, a teledentistry program that does a lot of the prep work before an in-person visit, and a program through which pediatricians can assess children in day care.

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McKnight’s Long-Term Care News

The demand for skilled care workers will grow by 13% through 2026, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor projections.

Overall, job growth in the healthcare sector is predicted to triple the pace seen in the rest of the nation’s economy.

Continued expansion will reflect “efforts to shift care to the community and out of hospitals,” reported Edward Salsberg, faculty member at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services and School of Nursing, and Robert Martiniano, M.D., project lead at the Center for Health Workforce Studies. Hospital employment is projected to grow 7% the next decade. Conversely, home healthcare and practices are expected to grow most rapidly, by 54% and 21%, respectively, by 2026.

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LI Herald

Keeping up with demand for highly skilled nurses has not been easy for many hospitals, though. Long-term shortages have plagued the profession in the past, according to a 2016 study by the Center for Health Workforce Studies at the State University of New York at Albany. Demand is expected to become increasingly acute in the coming decades.

The first baby boomers turned 65 in 2011, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The baby-boom generation, born between 1946 and 1963, was, until the millennials, the largest generation in U.S. history. As of 2014, there were some 76.4 million boomers, according to the census.

Never before has the U.S. seen such a large generation of people growing older. On top of that, exponential advances in medical technology are expected to keep boomers alive longer than previous generations.

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U.S  News & World Report

When hospital administrators insist on paying male physicians more money – even when female physicians have more experience, credentials and training – maybe it’s a reflex, like the knee-hammer test.

Time and time again, women physicians receive smaller salaries and lower signing bonuses than men, says Dr. Roberta Gebhard, president-elect of the American Medical Women’s Association and co-chair of AMWA’s gender equity task force.

In her task force role, Gebhard hears from women physicians, including full professors, who mentor male medical students only to learn they’re already earning much more straight out of their residency programs. She’s suffered from blatant pay inequities in her own career.

Pay gaps between newly trained male and female physicians aren’t only persisting – they’re growing, according to an analysis by the Center for Health Workforce Studies using data from the annual New York Resident Exit Survey.

On average, male physicians’ starting income was some $26,000 more than females’ in 2016. This gap was less than $10,000 in 2005, then up to nearly $12,000 by 2010. Gender wage gaps also showed up by specialty. Women dermatologists earned nearly $80,000 less, cardiologists earned about $64,000 less and emergency medicine physicians about $35,000 less than their early-career male counterparts.

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Becker’s Hospital Review

Healthcare jobs are expected to grow significantly faster than the rest of the economy over the next decade, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

For the analysis, researchers with the Center for Health Workforce Studies — a part of the School of Public Health at the University at Albany-State University of New York — examined Bureau of Labor Statistics employment data for 2006-16 and employment projections made by the bureau for 2016-26.

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McKnight’s Long-Term Care News

Skilled nursing facilities’ share of the healthcare workforce will shrink by 2026 even as its employee numbers grow, according to new projections built on Bureau of Labor data…

…“Over the decade (between 2006 and 2016), jobs in healthcare settings grew more the 20 percent, while jobs in the remainder of the economy only grew 3 percent.”

Healthcare job growth will diminish a bit through the current decade being studied, but it will still far outstrip the rest of the economy at 18% vs. 6%.

The Center for Health Workforce Studies, based at the School of Public Health of the University at Albany, reported its 2016–26 projections in advance of the Health Affairs blog.

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