Certification and other variables greatly influence department managers' compensation
Data by Suzanna Hoppszallern
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About this study This expanded online report includes eight data tables that did not accompany our print feature, including salary comparisons of respondents by size of facility, facility location, education level and more. This online report also includes salary bonus data not available in the print version of the story. |
Certification adds to a hospital department manager's salary. Department heads also make more in New England and the Pacific states, where the cost of living is higher. And working in the city no longer guarantees higher pay than the same job in the suburbs.
Those are some of the findings from a first-time survey on management compensation in health care conducted for Health Facilities Management, the American Society for Healthcare Engineering (ASHE) and the American Society for Healthcare Environmental Services (ASHES).
Many of the results from the comprehensive poll provide expected, if reassuring, statistical confirmation of what was generally assumed. For example, higher levels of experience, education and facility size generally correlate to more pay. But the poll also produced some surprises as well as new insights on pay disparities by region and managerial job category.
If you are a facilities manager in New England, a construction manager on the West Coast or in the Rocky Mountain states, or a support services manager in New England or the western Midwest, you are out-earning your peers; pay averages more than $120,000, including bonuses. On the other end of the pay spectrum, if you are an environmental services manager in the western Midwest or a facilities manager anywhere from Kentucky on south to the Gulf of Mexico, your salary is likely lagging the pack.
The February online survey was conducted by Perception Solutions Inc., Aurora, Ill., among health care organizations and members of ASHE and ASHES. A total of 1,752 people responded, making for an overall margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent. While it's difficult to draw many sweeping conclusions from the survey data, they appear to show that compensation is competitive and at least respectable for managers in health care, a business that has tended to trail others in many areas. It hasn't hurt that bonuses have increasingly become a significant and standard part of overall compensation packages in recent years.
Consultant Jack Gosselin, FASHE, CHFM, formerly a hospital facilities manager and a former ASHE board member, has been seeing indirect evidence of the rising pay—his recruiting firm has been receiving more and more resumes from people outside the field in academics and the hospitality industry who now want hospital facilities jobs. "There's a much higher degree of appreciation and professionalism in the health care management ranks these days," says Gosselin, principal of Gosselin Associates in Mystic, Conn.
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This article first appeared in the July 2009 issue of HFM.
