![]() ![]() How do you measure a GP’s productivity beyond the number of patients seen? What are the productivity indicators for aged care, or childcare? Hospital productivity can be measured in terms of bed availability, though not health outcomes. Health and care also happens to be the sector in which productivity is most difficult - probably impossible - to measure. It is an overwhelmingly female sector - there are more than three women for every man - though male employment grew even more rapidly in the period from 2019 than female employment, aided by the fact that full-time jobs have expanded much more rapidly in the past four years than part-time roles. But now more than one in seven people in the workforce - more than 2.1 million people - is in that sector. Health and caring has been our biggest employer since the Rudd years, and we’ve known that it would continue to grow as the population aged and governments pumped more money into hospitals and both residential and aged care. You'll also receive messages on behalf of our partners. And 27% of jobs created since May 2022 were in that sector. Put another way, nearly one-quarter of all additional jobs created in net terms since 2019 were in health and social care. ![]() Professional services - which became our second-biggest employer during the pandemic - grew by 17%. Retail grew by just 1.4%, accommodation and food by 3.7% (encompassing the pandemic collapse and recovery), and education and public administration both around 10%. How does that compare with other large employment sectors? In the four years to May, manufacturing - less than half the size of health and social care - marked time, though it grew strongly in the last year. Plainly that period covers a pandemic that drove huge demand for the health and aged care workforce, but the sector grew by more than 6% between May 2022 and May 2023 alone. In the same period, the overall workforce grew by 9%. The rapidly changing nature of Australia’s workforce is an issue policymakers and the economic commentariat are going to have to get their heads around - especially the way it will confound their textbook-based models of How Things Should Be.Įxhibit A: Australia’s health and care workforce - health, aged and disability care, childcare - grew by 29% between May 2019 and May 2023, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ most recent quarterly employment data. ![]()
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