NEW ORLEANS – In July 2017, there were 25,700 hospital employees in New Orleans, a 78 percent increase from ten years ago.
The dramatic increase lands New Orleans at the top of the a list for the biggest gains in hospital employees in the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas.
That’s according to a report from Stat News, which used data from the U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the report, New Orleans had 14,400 hospital employees in 2007.
While the bump in New Orleans’ ranking could be explained by the fact that the city’s population was still rebounding in 2007 after Hurricane Katrina, the New Orleans area still has more hospital employees than Austin, Texas and Las Vegas—cities that also made the list for top gains in the number of hospital employees.
According to the Metropolitan Report by The University of New Orleans Division of Business and Economic Research, hospitals have been a leading industry in New Orleans in the number of jobs created in the past year alone. Private hospitals added nearly 2,000 employees from 2016 to 2017, an 8.5 percent increase, the report states.
An additional 1,544 jobs were added from 2016 to 2017 in the health care and social assistance field.
-By Jenny Peterson, Associate News Editor, Biz New Orleans
