Workforce Shortage

"In rural or poor places like Mississippi the number of doctors per person is among the lowest in the country."

"Only a generation ago, medical students thought about what specialty to choose simply in terms of what interested them most.  All doctors made a comfortable income; money wasn’t a primary motivator.  There was a sense that cardiac surgeons or neurosurgeons could make more than most other physicians, but in fairness their training was much harder and longer.  Internal medicine was held up to us as the most prestigious and intellectually rigorous of the specialties, and was highly attractive to medical students who are a competitive lot at baseline."

"In rural or poor places like Mississippi the number of doctors per person is among the lowest in the country. Five years ago, the state Legislature established the Mississippi Rural Physician Scholarship Program to provide a full ride to medical students who agree to begin their practice in a rural area. There are two conditions: Students must originally come from a small Mississippi town far from health care, and they must agree to go back into practice in a rural area for four years after they graduate."

"At a time when half of primary care doctors say they’d leave medicine if they had an alternative and the NY Times reports on a family physician who can’t give away his practice this hardly seems like the obvious time to claim that primary care is positioned for a renaissance. However, if there’s one thing savvy investors have demonstrated, when everyone says to invest in something that is usually the time to get out. Conversely, when the conventional wisdom is to avoid something, that’s often the time savvy investors jump in."

"State and local healthcare groups say reforms to the state’s Doctors Across New York program will help address a critical shortage of physicians."

"The United States is facing a serious primary care shortage: By one projection, we’re expected to be short by nearly 29,000 primary care physicians by 2015. In discussions of how to address that, one policy solution tends to come up a lot: Allow a wider range of lower-paid medical professionals to provide the basic, primary care often offered by doctors. It’s a seeming win-win, as more primary care gets provided at lower costs."

"The county by county health rankings for 2012 have been released. In Northeast Tennessee, Washington County ranked the highest out of area counties with a ranking of 31. Johnson County ranked the lowest of the seven counties in our region at 66th. In Southwest Virginia, Washington County ranked the highest at 86th out of 131 counties and cities rated in the survey."

"As med school students are lured into high-paying specialties like dermatology and orthopedic surgery, the city’s public hospitals are looking to fill a shortage of lower-paying primary care doctors with a multi-million dollar scholarship program for students with New York ties."

"Geographic data firm Esri has put together a county-by-county map of which parts of the country have the greatest need for doctors right now. In the map below, the dark blue counties have a very low need for physicians, with fewer than 1,000 people per doctor’s office. The need is much higher in the dark orange locations, which have no primary care providers at all."