Employment and Wages
One of Kansas' largest industries, health care and social assistance, employed 15.7% of total workers in the state. After two years of decline, the industry grew by 1.9% in 2022 to 184,051 workers. The only sector to see an employment contraction was nursing and residential care facilities, seeing a 2.6% decline. Meanwhile, ambulatory health care services saw the largest employment increase of any sector, growing 4.3% to 61,870 employees. Hospitals employment grew by 2.3% while social assistance employment grew by 2.1%. Average annual wages in the industry grew 5.2%, to $54,623, after adjusting for inflation in 2022. These gains were seen in every sector, though to varying degrees. The ambulatory health care services sector had the slowest growth at 1.9%, increasing their average annual wage to $71,33. Social assistance wages grew fastest, at 10.6% compared to 2021, up to $26,905. Nursing home wages grew by 9% to $37,117. Hospitals saw a wage growth of 5% to $65,554.
News and Developments
- In March 2023, the University of Kansas School of Medicine-Wichita was given control of the Facts Not Fear ICT campaign and were allocated $2.4 million of funding for the project. The goal of the program is to “improve health literacy, community engagement, patient-provider communication and COVID-19 outcomes.
- On August 1st, 2023, Indianapolis-based Marathon Health completed the acquisition of Cerner Workforce Health Solutions from the Cerner Corporation. The Cerner Corporation was recently acquired in June 2022 by the San Francisco-based Oracle Corporation.
- In June 2023, Governor Laura Kelly announced that the planned new Advancing Barton County Childcare day care facility in Great Ben will receive $2.2 million as part of the Child Care Capacity Accelerator grant program.
- A study released in July 2023 by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform found 58% of rural hospitals were at risk of closure. In response, Governor Laura Kelly announced she would be pushing for Medicaid expansion, calling it “an obvious way to stop the bleeding”.
