Top Healthcare Career Paths Worth Considering

If you’re finishing a higher education program right now or trying to plan out a career change, you may be considering a healthcare career. This sector is full of jobs that many employers are struggling to find people to fill, and there’s likely to be a lot of growth in many areas over the coming years. If you’d like some inspiration on areas to consider, read on. 

Healthcare Manager 

For anyone who enjoys leading a team, a healthcare manager position can be perfect. This role provides the opportunity to combine management skills with day-to-day, hands-on work in the field. It’s a job that requires thinking about ways to increase patient safety levels and healthcare quality while also covering administrative functions. Healthcare managers can handle an entire facility or a single department. 

These administrators must be able to get on with a variety of personnel, too, since they work closely with those in custodial or medical roles, government employees, suppliers, and numerous other contact types. They also need to oversee staff, manage a budget, act as a media spokesperson, and handle strategic planning, among other things. 

If you’re interested in becoming a healthcare manager, you could work within a nursing home, hospital, healthcare or rehabilitation center, or government department. Diversity is possible, as a result, so you can try different areas over the years. 

Health Information Manager

If the above role doesn’t sound quite right for you, but you’re still interested in an administrative-type healthcare pathway, or if you’re very analytical and love working with data, consider health information management roles. These people compile, oversee, organize, maintain, check the accuracy of, and protect patient health data. This information can include medical histories, details about symptoms and diagnoses, medical procedures, test results, and more. 

Information management professionals ensure that an organization’s data remains accurate, accessible, and secure. They regularly work to provide a link between patients, doctors and other medical staff, and third-party payers, and operational, clinical, and administrative functions. 

To get this type of role, you’ll need to be educated about information technology applications, especially electronic medical records. You’ll have to know how to design data systems to be effective and comply with all ethical, legal, and medical standards. Plus, these managers need to observe audit and payment trends, analyze clinical data, create detailed reports, and ensure that other healthcare professionals can access the medical information as and when needed. 

Health information professionals get employed in pharmaceutical and insurance firms, nursing homes and hospitals, doctors’ offices, software companies, consulting businesses, and home health agencies. 

Phlebotomist

People who don’t mind seeing and working with blood might consider going down the phlebotomist pathway. This job involves using a sterilized needle to extract blood from patients in a venipuncture procedure, a key component of the phlebotomy program. Often the blood that’s taken gets used to test the patient’s health in some or many areas, but other times the blood is used for blood transfusions. 

Some people also work with urine and other samples, in addition to blood, and a vital part of the skills required for this phlebotomy role is setting up tests accurately and ensuring blood gets tested for the right things and with the correct patient details listed on sample tubes. Phlebotomists work in labs, medical centers, clinics, hospitals, or blood collection centers. 

Crisis Counselor

Another healthcare career path worth considering is that of a crisis counselor. As we all know, mental health is a growing concern worldwide, especially after the global pandemic and all the political, social, and financial unrest and uncertainty of recent years, not to mention many terrorist attacks and wars. 

This means there’s a continuing need for counselors who can help sufferers. One type of mental health worker is the crisis counselor, who aids those who have been through traumatic, emotionally intense, and/or exhausting experiences such as rape, horrific accidents, kidnappings, mass shootings, or other violent attacks. 

Crisis counselors assist their patients in working out their feelings and any limiting beliefs that are holding them back from moving forward and help people to create a healthy structure and a sense of control in their lives. Usually, these counselors work with patients for a limited time, such as one to three months. 

These are just some of the roles you might like to learn more about in the healthcare sector in the coming months. Keep in mind that job opportunities change and evolve over time, too, and new position types become available as the world and human needs change.