FRIDAY, June 12, 2026 (HealthDay News) — For patient care professions, the disparity is greater by city, with fewer workers in nonmetropolitan areas, according to a research letter published online June 9. Annals of internal diseases.
Todd Burrus, Ph.D., of the University of Kentucky in Lexington and Jason Semprini, Ph.D., of the University of Des Moines in Iowa, examined the current distribution of the U.S. health care workforce by workplace urbanization using the American Community Survey’s five-year Public Use Sample Microdata file. The total number of workers and workers per 10,000 population was calculated for 23 mutually exclusive occupational groups in the health sector.
The final sample included 588,489 respondents whose employment is known, representing 12,921,391 healthcare workers between 2019 and 2023; of that number, 8.4 percent worked in non-metropolitan areas, even though non-metropolitans make up 13.8 percent of the US population. The researchers found that, compared to cities, nonmetropolitan areas had 44.4 percent fewer workers per 10,000 residents (rate ratio (RR), 0.57), a significant difference for all 23 health care professional groups. Psychiatrists had the greatest variance by municipality (RR, 0.26), followed by physicians and surgeons (RR, 0.31 and 0.35). Compared to related support roles, occupations requiring higher levels of formal training showed greater metropolitan-non-metropolitan differences. The overall pattern remained similar in the two sensitivity analyses.
“Overall, nonmetropolitan areas had fewer health workers relative to population than urban areas, with large gaps in highly trained clinical and behavioral medicine roles,” the authors wrote.
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