Although not classified as healthcare workers, personal and home care aides are being affected by this demand for home care as well.

In fact, the county last year was fined $1.25 million by the state for exceeding a state cap on expenditures for personal care aides.

Rapid growth is expected for workers in occupations concentrated outside the inpatient hospital sector, such as pharmacy technicians and personal and home care aides.

The bureau says that nationally, home health aides earned an average of $19,200 in 2004, and care aides $17,600.

Mr. Mitchell has no paid home health care aides or housekeepers to help with his mother.

Both their wages - hers as a personal care aide at a nursing home, his as a copying machine serviceman - have been frozen.

Margaret Oates had taken a half-hour bus ride to the center from her job as a personal care aide.

Other than health care aides, she will see no one except a small circle of close friends.

She was applying for public assistance, she said, because she had recently lost her job as a personal care aide and has two children to support.

That was how she found a job as a personal care aide.