According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, an estimated 92 million people in the United States live in areas officially designated as Health Professional Shortage Areas. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects that by 2036, the country could face a shortfall of up to 86,000 physicians—a figure that does not account for growing shortages in behavioral health, dentistry, and many other medical specialties.
These figures are national averages. They don’t show how unevenly the shortages are actually distributed.
Communities with higher proportions of racial and ethnic minority residents are more likely to experience provider shortages and encounter greater barriers to care. Similar patterns affect many rural communities and Indigenous communities, where Health Service facilities have been chronically understaffed for generations—not by coincidence, but as a downstream effect of persistent underfunding and policy decisions spanning more than a century.
The impact of these gaps is clear in the data. In the United States, Black infants die at more than twice the rate of white infants. Black women are nearly three times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. Black Americans also experience higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease—conditions that are often manageable when timely, consistent care is available.
These disparities arise from intersecting forces: long-term disinvestment in certain communities, structural barriers within systems, economic challenges, and a persistent lack of clinicians in the areas with the highest need. No single intervention can resolve all of this. Yet meaningful progress is underway—through expanded healthcare coverage, increased investment in workforce diversity, stronger focus on maternal health, and more health systems and policymakers actively identifying and addressing inequities. The gaps are significant, but so is the momentum to close them.
Healthcare Access Is the Foundation
Before insurance coverage can make a difference, before preventive care can be delivered, and before any other part of the healthcare system can operate, a clinician must be present to provide care.
Provider shortages are often described as workforce challenges, but they are also questions of health equity. The communities most likely to lack providers are frequently those already experiencing the greatest barriers to care. When roles remain vacant, patients wait longer, diagnoses are delayed, and the clinicians who stay are asked to do more until they face burnout. The communities starting with the fewest resources feel the impact first and most intensely.
Where Locum Tenens Fits
Locum tenens is not a structural cure-all. It does not by itself close training pipeline gaps or undo decades of underinvestment in healthcare infrastructure. What it can do is help sustain access to care while longer-term solutions take shape.
Every day, locum tenens physicians, NPs, PAs, CRNAs, dentists, and other clinicians step into rural critical access hospitals, federally qualified health centers, Indian Health Service facilities, and urban safety-net clinics—communities of many different backgrounds that share one reality: not enough clinicians to meet patient needs.
Sometimes a single locum assignment keeps an OB service line open. Sometimes it ensures that a person in crisis has someone to call. Sometimes it means a child receives care that might otherwise be delayed. Together, these individual placements are what preserving access to care looks like in practice.
For clinicians considering locum work, the communities that need your skills most are often the ones that will feel your presence most immediately and most deeply.
The Work Ahead and the Reasons for Hope
Progress remains achievable, even when it comes later than it should. Announcing progress and truly delivering it are not the same—and the space between those two realities is where sustained effort is required.
Healthcare equity has its own version of this gap. Closing it is long-term, collective work that involves policymakers, health systems, medical schools, insurers, communities, workforce partners, and clinicians. No single organization, initiative, or staffing model can solve it alone.
Yet progress is happening. Awareness is increasing. Every action that brings care closer to a patient—every position filled, every shift covered, every clinician who chooses to serve a community with limited access—is a step forward.
The gap can narrow. It will take consistent commitment from all of us, showing up again and again for the communities that need care the most.