The nursing industry nationwide is booming, with lucrative careers, low unemployment and plenty of jobs available. But in Alabama, the outlook is a little less rosy.
The personal finance website WalletHub recently ranked the best and worst states in the country for nurses, and Alabama wound up in the bottom five. Some of the factors considered were nurses’ average salaries, the quality of public hospitals and the average number of hours worked per week.
Jill Gonzalez is an analyst for WalletHub. She says one of the major issues in Alabama is a lack of nursing job opportunities overall.
“We looked specifically into the number of nursing job openings per the population, and in Alabama, there’s really not a lot. There’s about 88 to go around per every 100,000 residents. And that was one of the lowest numbers that we saw.”
Gonzalez says that’s especially striking considering how many Alabamians live in areas with a shortage of health care providers. That figure, 37 percent, was the sixth highest in the country.