Wanted: Rural health care providers, but few answer the call

Several legislative committees have been examining the problem of health care provider shortages in rural North Carolina. And the answers they're getting point to complicated - and potentially expensive - answers. For years, rural hospitals, clinics and towns have been struggling to recruit physicians, and now, that lack of doctors in some of North Carolina’s more far-flung burgs is showing.“On almost any measures when you look at rural health, rural areas are doing poorer,” health economist Mark Holmes told lawmakers on the legislative Committee on Access to Rural Healthcare in North Carolina in January. She also noted the rural physician workforce is aging, with the average age for non-metropolitan physicians being 52.6 years, compared to urban doctors, who are 48.4 years old on average. Fraher and her colleagues at the Sheps Center studied four years’ worth of medical residents, from 2008-2011 and tracked their specialties and where they were practicing five years later. Their research showed that out of 2,009 physicians who graduated from North Carolina-based residency programs, fewer than half stayed in the state, and only 65 of them (3 percent) were practicing in rural areas. “This is a legislature that wants to know the return on investment, and the data show it’s really low,” Fraher said.