Nonmetropolitan Areas Have Fewer Health Care Workers

FRIDAY, June 12, 2026 (HealthDay News) -- For patient-facing health care occupations, disparities are seen by urbanicity, with fewer workers in nonmetropolitan areas, according to a research letter published online June 9 in the Annals of Internal Medicine.Todd Burus, Ph.D., from the University of Kentucky in Lexington, and Jason Semprini, Ph.D., from Des Moines University in Iowa, examined the current distribution of the U.S. health care workforce by workplace urbanicity using the 2019 to 2023 five-year American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Sample file. Total workers and worker rates per 10,000 residents were estimated for 23 mutually exclusive health care occupation groups.The final sample included 588,489 respondents with a known workplace location, which represented 12,921,391 actively employed health care workers in 2019 to 2023; of those, 8.4 percent worked in nonmetropolitan areas, although nonmetropolitan persons comprised 13.8 percent of the U.S. population. The researchers found that compared with metropolitan areas, nonmetropolitan areas had 44.4 percent fewer workers per 10,000 residents (rate ratio [RR], 0.57), with significant differences seen for all 23 health care occupation groups. Psychologists had the greatest disparity by urbanicity (RR, 0.26), followed by physicians and surgeons (RRs, 0.31 and 0.35, respectively). Compared with related support roles, occupations requiring higher levels of formal training demonstrated greater metropolitan-nonmetropolitan disparities. The overall pattern remained similar in two sensitivity analyses."Overall, nonmetropolitan areas had fewer patient-facing health care workers relative to population size than metropolitan areas, with the largest gaps found in highly trained clinical and behavioral health roles," the authors write.Abstract/Full Text (subscription or payment may be required).Sign up for our weekly HealthDay newsletter

Nonmetropolitan Areas Have Fewer Health Care Workers

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