Health Workforce Studies
Most recent reports:
The Physician Workforce: Projections and Research into Current Issues Affecting Supply and Demand
For at least a decade, the United States has experienced worsening workforce shortages in the health professions. Analysts now are projecting a nationwide shortage of almost 100,000 physicians, as many as one million nurses, and 250,000 public health professionals by 2020.
Due to the high cost of health insurance and increasingly pervasive staffing shortfalls in the health professions, at least 50 million Americans lack access to the most basic care. A third are children.
Targeted workforce studies document and project shortages and other trends that influence the adequacy of the U.S. health care system to meet current and future needs.
Highlights
- Toward a Method for Identifying Facilities and Communities with Shortages of Nurses Summary Report (February 2007)
- The Registered Nurse Population: Findings from the 2004 National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (March 2006)
- Index of All Health Workforce Reports
- Public Use Files from National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses
- Area Resource File database comprising data from more than 50 sources
- The physician workforce is aging, average hours worked are falling, and many physicians are nearing retirement just as growth and aging of the population and advances in technology contribute to a growing demand for physician services.
- The pharmacy vacancy rate has fallen from 8 percent in 2000 to approximately 5 percent in 2004, equivalent to a shortage of about 10,400 pharmacists nationwide.
- Employment in nursing rose to more than 83 percent of registered nurses with active licenses, the highest since 1980, in 2004, when the most recent National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses was conducted. The average age of RNs climbed to 46.8 years, the highest average age since the first comparable report was published in 1980.
- A growing shortage of registered nurses has been projected over the next 15 fifteen years, with a 12 percent shortage by 2010 and a 20 percent shortage by 2015. The projected shortage is the result of the expected increase in demand coupled with a relatively stable supply of RNs.
