An article that I read today made me do some very quick math. It confirmed something that I had long known qualitatively but put it into a very stark perspective. Health care workers are a distinct minority!
While reading a copy of the daily news from FierceHealthcare (May 24, 2012), I happened across an article concerning the direct-care workforce. This was defined as “nursing assistants, home-health aides and personal-care aides.” Their number was listed as being 4 million strong. This section of healthcare was reported to comprise of 31 percent of the entire US healthcare workforce.
I had worked a similar problem before and thought I would work the math again to see if the numbers would be any different. Let’s see, 31 percent is about one third, so multiply 4 million times 3 and the answer is – 12 million people included in the US health care employment statistics. Sounds like a lot of people! Further research revealed that New York City has a population of just over 8 million and Ohio has a population of 11.5 million people. Just as I thought – there are a lot of people in health care.
But as Ron Popeil is fond of saying on his infomercials, “But wait, there’s more!” The 2010 Census shows that the country’s total population is over 312 million. So let’s carry the math exercise out a little further. Twelve million healthcare workers divided by 312 million people in the country times 100 (to make the answer a percentage) yields… 3.84 percent! Somehow, 12 million doesn’t seem like such a large number any more.
Well other than providing a demonstration of my mathematical skills, what does this mean for those of us who work in health care? If you get nothing else out of this exercise, please take this one item of information with you. Most of the people in this country (96%) do not view health care in the same manner that we do.
The 96 percent doesn’t speak that language of health care (NPO, PRN, grams per deciliter, etc.). They don’t view disease and health in the same light that we do. They don’t think in terms of relative risk, quality adjusted life years and disease transmission vectors. Some of these people may be informed about some aspects of their health. Often they focus in on things of particular importance to them.
In order to promote better health to everyone in the country, we have to take a few lessons from the marketing master, Ron Popeil. We must market good health as something to be sought after. We must show excellent health as being better than poor health. We need to stress, in words that the average person understands, that good health is worth the effort it takes to achieve it. And we need to do this with words that the 96 percent understands and can identify with. As Frank Luntz so aptly titled one of his books; Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What They Hear.