Moreover, the pool of health care professionals is expected to shrink because of increased opportunities in other fields for women, who traditionally have dominated the health-care professions.

Yet another reason for exclusion, insurance executives say, is a high incidence of claims by people in the health-care professions, like doctors, dentists, nurses, chiropractors and other medical workers.

As states have increasingly recognized midwifery as a health-care profession, many, including Connecticut and New York, have imposed licensing requirements, making midwives like her illegal.

"There have been people who have been HIV positive in the health-care professions for years, and nobody has raised the issue until now," she said.

Mabel K. Staupers, a nurse who spent her career encouraging black women in the health-care profession, died of pneumonia Saturday at her home in Washington.

But he added that the patients' identities were encoded at the county level, and not made public even to regulatory boards in the health-care professions.

Firstly, apart from architects and, in some respects, veterinary surgeons, they are all health-care professions in the widest sense.

We think people in the health-care profession should live by example, but they don't.

The problem of poor pay is complicated by a much more insidious problem - many nurses feel they are second-class citizens in the health-care profession.

Nursing is a health-care profession which is mainly aimed on the care of families and individuals.