Primary Care Authority meeting

At today’s meeting, the Primary Care Authority accepted UConn’s report *check link * assessing CT’s primary care workforce capacity. The upshot of the report is that by a simple calculation of licensed providers per population we are OK. But that is only part of the story – that is probably an overestimate. The list of gaps in data is long – which providers are no longer practicing, which are sub-specialists and not practicing primary care, how many are part-time, etc. It appears that rural areas have fewer providers, but as DPH allows either home or work addresses on licenses, this is hard to pin down as well. Most primary care providers (PCPs) are doctors (75%), the rest are nurse practitioners (20%), physician assistants (3%) and nurse midwives (2%). The authors developed a measure that merges rates of uninsured residents with PCP capacity and found that Windham county faces the largest stresses to its primary care structure, New Haven the least, although CT’s are similar to MA’s. Not surprisingly, the authors expect a shortage of PCPs in CT soon due to the population’s growth and aging, increasing rates of chronic illness and the dwindling number of med school graduates going into primary care.
Ellen Andrews