By Steve McFarland,Special to the Sun Journal

Wouldn’t it be great if a well-known employer contacted Maine’s Office of Economic and Community Development and said that it wanted to relocate to Maine and expand to more than 10,000 new jobs in the next 10 years? Wait, it gets better. The majority of these jobs will offer annual salaries of more than $35,000.

If this happened, I’m sure that Maine would roll out the red carpet and be more than willing to offer tax credits and infrastructure improvements to make it a reality.

The phone is ringing; will someone please pick it up?

That employer is here in Maine, right now. Who is it? Health care.

Our state’s economic plan has identified seven industries in which it wants to grow businesses, create good jobs and develop a skilled workforce. Yet health care, one of the fastest-growing industries with some of the best paying jobs, is not among them. And – here’s the double bonus – filling these jobs will help meet the health care needs of people in Maine.

We already have, on average, one of the oldest populations in the country. Meanwhile, the baby-boom generation moves closer and closer to retirement and – yes – old age. This oversized generation will increasingly access health care, adding stress and strain to the system. We must ensure that skilled health care workers are available to provide the needed care.

Right now, local hospitals and other health care providers have good jobs available and not enough people who are trained to fill them. This trend will continue. According to Maine’s Labor Market Information Service, 10 out of the 40 fastest-growing occupations in Maine are in health care and health services. LMIS predictions through 2012 indicate there will be almost 3,500 new registered nurse jobs; more than 1,000 new medical assistant jobs, and about 500 new jobs each for social workers, medical records technicians, and health services managers. Add to that, healthy job growth for respiratory therapists, physician assistants, physical and occupational therapists, and many other health-related careers.

If you want a job, health care wants you, but you must have the skills. For these positions providing solid wages and good benefits, that means a college degree. So, why not just train more health care professionals?

First, health care education programs are expensive to operate; standard tuition and fees do not fully cover the costs. College administrators are reluctant to expand health care programs and accept additional students during a period of decreased funding from the state. As a result, we now have significant waiting lists at many programs, most notably nursing.

Second, additional health care faculty members are hard to find. Those who are qualified to teach often seek and readily find jobs in settings that pay higher wages.

Finally, there are simply not enough people with the education and skills to fill the various health care jobs. Of Maine’s 16 counties, Androscoggin County has one of the lowest percentages of residents with a college degree. This does not bode well for the local health care industry, nor does it attract new businesses to the area.

What can be done?

Leaders from the local colleges and health care institutions have come together as the Health Care Action Team to begin addressing these issues. This broad-based collaboration successfully obtained a Maine Health Access Foundation grant so we could work together on the research and analysis of the local health care workforce, and will help us solve our needs as a group, rather than as competitors. We now have targeted efforts aimed at addressing these workforce shortage issues in Androscoggin County, and are beginning to put our plan into action.

More needs to be done, particularly at the state level. The Legislature recently passed a bill to provide loan repayment options for nurses who complete an appropriate degree and agree to teach in any Maine school of nursing for a minimum of three years. The Legislature will need to appropriate funding to this initiative, a logical move in attracting qualified professionals to the teaching profession.

A bill in front of the next legislative session seeks to invest $1.7 million in Maine’s community college and university nursing programs in order to increase capacity and reduce the waiting lists of potential future nurses. Passage of this bill is critical if we hope to begin addressing even a small portion of the healthcare workforce shortages locally.

Other bills with similar missions will be introduced in coming years, and yes, there will be a price tag attached to each. At a time when state resources are extremely tight, it may seem that we cannot afford to spend any additional dollars on higher education, but doing nothing is shortsighted and bad for our state’s economic and physical health.

The phone is ringing. More than 10,000 good jobs are on the line. Is there someone here to answer?

Steve McFarland is director of Pathways to Higher Education at the University of Southern Maine.

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