HLTH 6510 Week 10 Health Workforce Brief Example

Workforce Brief: Who Delivers Care in the Two-County Region, Where They Are Missing and How Fast Supply Can Change

Student Name

Walden University

HLTH 6510: Essentials of the U.S. Healthcare Delivery System and Population Health

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Workforce Brief: Who Delivers Care in the Two-County Region, Where They Are Missing and How Fast Supply Can Change

Purpose

This brief describes the health care workforce in the course's composite two-county region by profession, shows how that supply is distributed between the urban and rural counties and explains the pipeline and licensure arrangements that determine how quickly supply can change. Figures are illustrative values for the composite region, of the kind available from state licensure data and federal workforce sources. Nationally, a widely cited projection found that population growth and aging alone would require many more primary care physicians by 2025 (Petterson et al., 2012); the regional question is where the shortfall falls.

Supply and Distribution

Table 1 compares supply per 100,000 residents in the two counties.

Table 1

Selected Health Professionals per 100,000 Residents (Illustrative, Composite Region)

The rural county has less than half the urban county's supply in most professions and almost no resident specialists.

Shortage Designation

The rural county is designated as a health professional shortage area for primary care, dental care and mental health under federal law (42 U.S.C. § 254e), which provides for designating geographic areas, population groups and facilities with too few clinicians relative to need. Designation unlocks loan repayment and scholarship programs for clinicians who serve there, higher Medicare payments in some cases and eligibility for certain grants. It recognizes the shortage but does not by itself fill it.

The Pipeline and Licensure

Supply changes slowly for three reasons. Training time. A primary care physician needs four years of medical school and three years of residency after college; a nurse practitioner, two to three years after a nursing degree. Residency positions. Physicians tend to practice near where they train, and the region's only residency program, at the regional medical center, trains internal medicine physicians in the urban county. Medicare funding for residency positions has been largely capped since the late 1990s, which limits expansion. Licensure and scope. State law determines what nurse practitioners may do without physician oversight, and this state requires a collaborative agreement, which makes independent rural practice harder. Multistate licensure compacts for nurses make it easier for nurses licensed in other compact states to work in the region, but physicians and many behavioral health professionals still need a state license or a separate compact pathway.

What the Brief Implies

The rural county's shortages explain much of what earlier weeks found: long waits for specialists, limited evening hours and patients traveling 50 miles for care. Because the pipeline takes years, the fastest available levers are retaining current clinicians, using loan repayment to recruit to the shortage area, extending the reach of existing clinicians through telehealth and team-based care and, over a longer horizon, supporting a rural residency track. A systems text frames workforce as one of the structural resources that determine what any delivery system can do (Shi & Singh, 2019), and in the rural county it is the binding constraint.

References

Health professional shortage areas, 42 U.S.C. § 254e (2023).

Petterson, S. M., Liaw, W. R., Phillips, R. L., Rabin, D. L., Meyers, D. S., & Bazemore, A. W. (2012). Projecting US primary care physician workforce needs: 2010-2025. Annals of Family Medicine, 10(6), 503-509. https://doi.org/10.1370/afm.1431

Shi, L., & Singh, D. A. (2019). Delivering health care in America: A systems approach (7th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.