AHRQ Releases Primary Care Workforce Analysis

Abstract

More than half of Americans’ 956 million visits to office-based physicians in 2008 were to primary care doctors, but less than one-third of U.S. physicians are primary care specialists, according to new data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). This leaves the primary care system “struggling,” the agency reports.

The data comes from the first of a series of fact sheets that AHRQ plans to release over the next few months to provide policy-makers with information on the primary care workforce.

Only 52 percent of nurse practitioners and 43 percent of physician assistants practice primary care. The U.S. primary care system is facing “increasing demands and expectations, diminishing economic margins, and increasing workforce attrition compounded by diminishing recruitment of new physicians, nurses, and physician assistants into primary care,” AHRQ says.

The agency plans to examine several more topics, including the distribution of the primary care workforce, the population-to-primary-care professional ratio and its impact on care, and the needs of the primary care workforce due to health reform, population growth and demographic change.

Read more about the primary care workforce fact sheet series.
See the primary care physician fact sheet.
See the nurse practitioner and physician assistants fact sheet.

Reproduced with permission of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Princeton, N.J.