What are allied health professions?
If you want to work in health care, it’s not just doctor, nurse, or dentist anymore. With advances in medicine and technology, health care professions in the 20th century expanded to create scores of new health career categories, from occupational therapist to lab tech–commonly called the allied health professions. Training programs for allied health professions have developed in many colleges and parts of the University. For more information, see the American Medical Association’s Allied health careers and the Health Professions Network Exploring allied health professions. In occupational therapy, an 8 percent vacancy rate is considered a crisis; the national vacancy rate now stands at 11 percent. The estimated need for new medical technologists in Minnesota is about 150 to 200 a year, but current programs graduate only about 45 a year. The outlook for some allied health jobs in Minnesota is predicted to grow by more than 30 percent over the next four to six years as the population a
