Matching Supply to Demand: Addressing the U.S. Primary Care Workforce Shortage

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While there is little debate about a growing primary care workforce shortage in the United States, precise estimates of current and projected need vary. A secondary problem contributing to addressing capacity shortfalls is that the distribution of primary care practitioners often is mismatched with patient needs. For example, patients in rural areas or low-income patients—particularly the uninsured—may have greater problems accessing primary care services than well-insured, suburban residents. Most efforts to improve access to primary care services center on increasing the supply of practitioners through training, educational loan forgiveness or scholarships, credentialing, and higher payment rates. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) includes many provisions promoting these strategies. While existing, longer-term efforts to boost the primary care workforce are necessary, they may be insufficient for some time because a meaningful increase in practitioners will take decades. Rather, policy makers may want to consider ways to increase the productivity of primary care providers and accelerate primary care workforce expansion by, for example, examining how changes in state scope-of-practice policies might increase the supply of non-physician practitioners

• Primary Care Access Problems Likely to Grow
• Increasing Primary Care Capacity
• Other Policy Options
• Looking Ahead
• Notes
• Data Source

Primary Care Access Problems Likely to Grow

The current and likely growing undersupply of primary care practitioners in the United States is a focus of both state and national policy makers, particularly as overall population growth and aging, coupled with coverage expansions under health reform, will accelerate demand for primary care in the coming years. Collectively, an estimated 400,000 practitioners, including physicians—both allopathic and osteopathic—advanced practice nurses (APNs) and physician assistants (PAs), provide primary care in the United States.1 Primary care physicians are typically categorized as those with postgraduate medical training in family medicine, pediatrics or internal medicine.
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