Careers in Healthcare
Healthcare careers was the topic for a recent Job Forum event with 45 job hunting attendees.
Key points included the need for 19,000 new physicians due to an aging population and retiring doctors. All the healthcare experts, who volunteered to advise job hunters, talked about the importance of teamwork and empathy in healthcare. UCSF, the largest employer in San Francisco, was highlighted, with 44,000 employees.
AM Guerrero spoke about UCSF’s youth Workforce Development initiative, that is relatively new to the university. UCSF is providing training pathways for high school students. He said” That’s something that all are excited about. Given that the healthcare industry is in great need of all types of folks to come and support and provide a positive patient experience for those people coming through the UCSF Health system.
UCSF is now, the number one employer in the City and County of San Francisco, with approximately 44,000 employees, staff members, This is In large part due to recent acquisitions of St. Mary’s Hospital and St. Francis Hospital. So that’s what helped UCSF claim that number one spot as the number one largest employer in the City and County of San Francisco. UCSF is now the fourth largest employer in the Bay Area region, The UCSF Medical Center is large and includes hospitals such as the UCSF Medical Center at Parnassus campus. You’ve heard of Mount Zion and St Francis and St Mary’s mentioned just earlier, and also we have the children’s hospitals, both at Mission Bay Campus and across the Bay at Benioff Children’s Hospital Oaklan and UCSF Fresno. A lot of people don’t realize that we have a regional presence, a longstanding presence in the Fresno San Joaquin Valley Area. In the UCSF Fresno Regional Campus, there is the VA and our own San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center is also staffed heavily by UCSF Medical Staff, and that’s where UCSF gets to serve U.S. military with service-related or age health needs. And then, of course, we make up a big, amount of the staffing of the UCSF of the General Hospital in San Francisco. That is the city’s public hospital and trauma center”.
Bob Herman discussed the evolving and important role of electronic medical records, and the many opportunities in health care, emphasizing the importance of detail-oriented work and AI integration. He said “Working in medical records and hospital data is a fascinating career. There’s a lot of configuration management that you do in electronic software, and healthcare is field that really has an outstanding future. Healthcare is not going away, even with artificial intelligence. AI provides support of analytic data to help a clinical provider do the best treatment plan based on statistics, but it’s never going to replace empathy. And it’s never going to replace the human factor of working with a patient, and the human factor of having nurses and doctors and caregivers support you during your medical journey. There are many opportunities because there is so much medical data. AI is great. It’s being used by UCSF. It’s being used by Kaiser. When you have a procedure or talk to your doctor, and now they chart your medical record using AI, it is magnificent because you are having a conversation with the doctor, and the doctor is talking to you and looking you in the eyes, and this can happen because AI tools are documenting what you are discussing for the medical records, putting it in in very medical terminology”
Dr. Peter Carroll stressed the diverse roles and satisfying challenges in medicine and the need for doctors and all sorts of physician support professionals. He explained that as a physician, you can you can pick out specialties. He said: “Healthcare is in need of all specialties. Certainly, family physicians and internists. In medicine and health care you need to need to like people. You meet all sorts of people in healthcare. You meet patients sometimes in the most vulnerable states. You develop a special relationship with patients that is very, very, very unique. You work as a team. We’ve seen more growth of the use of a healthcare team over the last 45 years which is a positive . You need to be a problem solver, come under pressure, and still have attention to detail, and of course, obviously, you need to have strong ethical standards. It’s a long process getting to be a doctor. You get an undergraduate degree. You need to take a test, MCAT. You have to gain experience and develop a specialty. The path is college, four years of medical school, and then between three and six years afterwards, depending on what specialty you’re doing, what specialty you choose. For me, being a doctor, it’s a wonderful life”.
Rita Kelly, an experienced nurse shared insights on nursing, emphasizing the need for education and practical experience to determine what you want as a life in healthcare. She spoke about the fact that there are more opportunities than ever for nurses. She offered the creative idea of starting to explore health care by finding out all the roles in health care. She said: “One idea is go be an emergency medical tech, an .EMT, Go do an EMT program. It’s like a big orientation to what healthcare is truly about, picking up patients, bringing them into the hospital, seeing the interaction between the arrival into the hospital to the physician to taking the patient off the gurney, bringing the patient to the bed, seeing to it that somebody’s going to come care for the patient and do an EKG, somebody’s going to come and draw labs, and this is one way to see what you may want to get into next. My entry way was, as a nurse, to get my nursing education and start nursing in the hospital emergency department and from there all sort of opportunities opened up for me to specialize, and learn more and more and so I have had a really rich carer as a nurse specializing in 4-5 specialty departments and programs.
Maha Mitra described that there are healthcare public policy research organizations that work to improve healthcare on a large scale, at a population level. And the real -world evidence generation is vital, for government stakeholders and federal clients. The work involves looking at data and providing consultancy services to help these organizations make better decisions. Health care policy agencies also do a lot of work in evaluating healthcare programs and generating objective, evidence-based research. She said: “I work as a senior research analyst and an epidemiologist at Acumen, a public policy research firm. A lot of people kind of correlate us with disease detectives- true!. And there is a lot of program and project management work to do. A day in my life looks very much like getting several pieces of a project moving together, including asking the right questions and then putting together the study protocol, analyzing large healthcare data sets, and really getting to the evidence base that serves federal clients like the FDC and CDC.”
Joe Markunas, works for the 2GO Advisory Group, consulting in healthcare work, in support of medical practices, and Biotech and Life Sciences organizations too, helping to manage and contribute to the financial and accounting and procedures and outcomes tracking. He describes: “I’ve worked with quite a range of healthcare professionals, for example there was a healthcare provider who developed a medical device that had to go through FDA regulatory approval. In other cases, I’ve worked with medical groups that were either acquiring other practices or were being acquired by corporate interests, private equity firms.
Healthcare providers are also business men and women, and they have all the challenges that every other business that I consult with has, whether it’s financial, accounting, HR, regulatory, and succession planning, legal-all of these challenges that a manufacturing client that I work with in Silicon Valley, those same challenges exist for healthcare providers. And as brilliant as most, if not all, of my healthcare clients are-they may not have the schooling and the business experience to tackle some of these business-related issues. So it’s my role to come in and provide that expertise, help them grow their business or make their business sustainable. So I hope I will encourage you to think about the fact that on the finance, accounting and consulting side of healthcare, there is a business need, and there are many opportunities that you might find available to focus upon healthcare in meaningful ways that have a real impact”.
Beatrix Kapowsinski, is a Public Health Lab Director, and has been a microbiologist for 27 years, and is currently directing the public health laboratory that serves four counties in California, Napa, Solano, Yuma, Marine, with population over 1 million people. She explains: “We are detecting and monitoring infectious disease agents like tuberculosis, influenza, COVID, RSV, various sexually transmitted diseases. We also support outbreak investigations, and so that’s the clinical side of the laboratory. And we also do environmental testing. We do tick testing and animal testing, rabies testing, water testing. We’re providing all these services to physicians, hospital clinics, veterinarians, environmental health agencies, law enforcement. So it’s a very diverse audience for us. Our laboratory also serves as a training laboratory for the future workforce in California for public health microbiologists in California, one of the states in United States where the public health microbiologists have to be certified by state of California to be eligible to work at public health laboratories. So we are supporting that program annually. We’re providing training at California Department of Public Health, and also in conjunction with other public health laboratories. One thing to know about California, which is very unique across the nation, we have close to 28 laboratories, public health laboratories, where other states, mostly they have only one public health laboratory. So we have a very strong network of public health laboratories to support disease investigations and follow outbreaks. As a lab director, my daily life is to keep our laboratory compliant because we’re certified by CLIA, we ere CLIA certified, which is Clinical Laboratory Improvement Act, and also ELAP certified by Environmental Laboratory Accreditation Program. So those programs are very rigorous, and we have to ensure that our testing systems are accurate. And we maintain a good quality of the testing across the whole process of specimens that we’re handling at our laboratory.
I’m very hopeful that many people will get really interested in laboratory science work. This is what I do on a daily basis, and it’s very helpful and a great career. “
The session concluded with a Q&A session.
