Barnstable Ranked Among Best Cities for Healthcare Social Workers

Cape Cod residents looking for a job in healthcare social work nearby will be pleased to know that Barnstable outranked more than 300 other cities in the nation for opportunities in such a role. 

The recently-compiled "Best Cities for Healthcare Social Workers" list was assembled by the data website ValuePenguin, and looks at the top cities based on salary and employment statistics for healthcare social workers. 

Barnstable outranked 326 other cities to place at 20th on the list. The median salary of $54,810 is 15-percent higher than the median national salary, but is balanced by a cost of living index of 161, the highest on the top 20 list, according to Ting Pen, Co-Founder of ValuePenguin. 

"The city enjoys a high location quotient of 2.73, which indicates that there are almost three times as many jobs for healthcare social workers here relative to other cities," Pen told Barnstable-Hyannis Patch on Monday.

ValuePenguin began producing the reports for the list as an offshoot of its education features, in which it received questions about the best cities to work in for specific professions, Pen said.

"We decided to create these studies to let future and current healthcare social workers know of new cities that they may not have considered," he said. "I compiled median salary and job data for healthcare social workers in the United States, and layer in the cost of living for each of the cities reported. I then rank the cities based on a composite score of the three factors."

Carson City, Nevada ranked first on the list, but several Massachusetts communities were also high in the rankings, with the Taunton-Norton-Raynham area taking the fourth spot. Springfield, meanwhile, took the eighth spot, while New Bedford was ranked 14th, and the Brockton-Bridgewater-Easton area was ranked 17th. 

"There are several factors people can consider when deciding to start or relocate a practice, but salary and cost of living are the two most important that also have quantifiable data," Pen said. "These two metrics form the basis of our study, along with employment concentration (as a measure of job availability), which measures the concentration of a particular profession in a city relative to other cities.