Mississippi's physician labor force: current status and future challenges.

The literature review indicates that changes in Medicaid/Medicare reimbursement, large numbers of uninsured patients, the legal climate, and largely rural and chronically ill populations create a challenging environment for physicians practicing in Mississippi. As a largely rural state, many Mississippians find medical care to be physically distant, with most care being concentrated in a couple areas of the state. Given these factors, the legal climate in Mississippi and the top relocation decision factors, Mississippi will be further challenged in recruiting and retaining the numbers of general practitioners and specialists necessary to provide care to the state's population. The challenges that physicians are facing have led to challenges for health policy makers, in that physicians are difficult to recruit to Mississippi and, once here, difficult to retain as practitioners throughout their career. Four datasets were used in conjunction to analyze the demographic characteristics of Mississippi's physicians, including the age structure disaggregated by several other variables. Ultimately, the results were extended to impacts of recruitment, relocations, and retirement decisions of physicians who participated in the MSMDS. Briefly, demographic results indicate that Mississippi has a largely white physician population serving a nearly 40% minority population in Mississippi. The under representation of women within the medical profession in Mississippi means that women in the state might find it unusually challenging to find a female physician, particularly in rural areas where access to physicians is more limited in the first place. Mississippi has a high concentration of African-American patients with a low African-American physician presence. The proportion of physicians who are female is on the rise nationwide and within Mississippi, largely due to increasing enrollments of women in medical schools. Though variations exist within the groups of physicians identified as generalists, Mississippi is only slightly more likely than the nation to have specialists, rather than generalists (see Table Seven). Age structure analysis indicates that Delta physicians are older than physicians elsewhere in the state, that urban physicians are younger than rural physicians, and that our physician labor force is more highly concentrated between the ages of 35 and 54 than in the nation as a whole. Analyses concerning the future of the physician labor force indicate that a near majority of Mississippi's practicing physicians received their MD degree at UMC, but younger physicians are more likely to have been educated out-of-state than older physicians. Those who received their degrees elsewhere and chose to practice in Mississippi are more likely to be specialists (60%) than generalists (40%). Those physicians practicing in the state who were educated in-state are nearly equally as likely to be generalists (47%) as they are to be specialists (53%). Additionally, those approaching retirement are more likely to be generalists, yet the state is recruiting more generalists from recent medical school classes than in the past. Variations in intentions to recruit, relocate, and retire exist. However, most of the substantively important variation is across age groups and time in practice. There is little relevance of specialty or location within the state when examining variation in recruitment, relocation or retirement plans. Given the findings, policy research recommendations focus on improving the retention of UMC's graduates for practice in the state, improving retention of active physicians, increasing the recruitment of physicians from out of state, and easing difficulties associated with working part-time as a step toward retirement. With these changes in policy, it is possible that Mississippi can thwart a physician workforce shortage; however, without changes, with more physicians relocating, retiring early, or opting out of practicing in the state, the extant physician shortage will become more severe. Furthermore, without the data collection efforts mentioned here, there will be no means to assess whether policy changes are actually impacting the physician labor force.