The healthcare workforce shortage: how large it actually is, by specialty

Healthcare workforce shortage projections span physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals, but the underlying drivers and severity differ meaningfully by specialty rather than reflecting a single uniform crisis, which matters for understanding where access is actually most likely to be affected in the coming years versus where the shortage language, while real, describes a less acute near-term problem.

Primary care and certain specialties with a large share of physicians nearing retirement age — geriatrics notably, given the aging population that specialty is meant to serve, and psychiatry, given surging demand for mental health care that's outpaced workforce growth for years — face some of the more severe projected shortages, compounded in primary care and geriatrics by the fact that medical school graduates have trended toward higher-paying specialties over the past couple of decades, leaving fewer new physicians entering these lower-compensated fields relative to actual need.

Nursing shortage dynamics are somewhat different in character — driven less by insufficient interest in the profession and more by nursing school faculty shortages that cap how many new nurses training programs can actually admit and graduate each year, alongside high turnover and burnout among practicing nurses, particularly in high-acuity settings, meaning the nursing shortage is in significant part a training-pipeline bottleneck rather than purely a demand problem.

For patients, the practical near-term effects of these shortages are already visible in some regions and specialties as longer wait times for a new patient appointment, particularly in primary care, psychiatry, and geriatrics — for anyone establishing care with a new specialist in a shortage-affected field, starting that search well before an urgent need arises, and being open to nurse practitioners and physician assistants who increasingly fill primary care and psychiatric care gaps with growing scope-of-practice authority in many states, are practical ways to navigate the access effects of these shortages as they continue to play out.