Trends in Health Manpower

Since the Fall 1984 issue, Health Affairs has published every quarter data that seek to report the most important trends in health care. Once a year, the trends of a significant quarter of the total sphere are reported. The schedule is Fall: National Medical Care Spending; Winter: Trends in Health Manpower; Spring: Health Status and Medical Care Utilization; and Summer: Health Care In-novation. In this issue, Lauren LeRoy, assistant director at the Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California, San Francisco, examines health manpower issues in collaboration with John K. Iglehart and Deborah A. Ellwood of Health Affairs . LeRoy, whose dissertation dealt with the labor market for nurses, has also recently joined the faculty of the School of Hygiene and Public Health at The Johns. Hopkins University as associate director of The Commonwealth Fund Commission on Elderly People Living Alone. Also in this issue, Jeffrey C. Merrill and Richard J. Wassermann of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation continue the analysis of the growth in national health expenditures which was begun by Gerard Anderson and Karen Davis and colleagues of The Johns Hopkins University in our last issue. John Ashby and Carolyn Parmer of the D.C. Hospital Association present data on the effects of Medicare PPS on core city versus suburban hospitals.