About Health Professions
Health Resources and Services Administration Health Professions programs provide policy leadership and grant support for health professions workforce development - making sure the U.S. has the right clinicians, with the right skills, working where they are needed.
Many Americans lack access to an ongoing source of health care. This is primarily attributable to two factors: lack of health insurance and a shortage of health professionals.
HRSA’s health professions programs are designed to address these growing shortages throughout the country. These programs, which include a wide-range of training programs, scholarships, loans, and loan repayments for health professions students and practitioners, are essential to producing health professionals who provide high quality, culturally competent health care.
HRSA Health Professions programs identify shortage areas while working to make them obsolete. They reach down into middle schools and high schools to expose promising students to health care careers and reach out to experienced clinicians to give them the skills needed to work where health care is scarce.
The programs are as diverse as the workforce and include grant programs that bolster health professions training programs, a payment program for children’s hospitals that train pediatricians, national data banks that protect the public from medical malpractice and health care waste, fraud and abuse.
They help schools make scholarships and affordable loans to health professions students and help states recruit clinicians to underserved areas in exchange for loan repayment.
- More than 6,000 U.S. communities are primary medical care Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs); 4,000 are dental HPSAS; and 3,000 are mental health HPSAs.
- There are significant shortages of primary care physicians in regions of the country. The number of medical students selecting primary care continues to decline.
- There is a critical shortage of nurses; this shortage could reach up to one million by 2020.
- The current public health workforce is inadequate to meet the health needs of the U.S. population. Shortages are projected to reach 250,000 by 2020.
- The health professions workforce does not reflect the diversity of the population it serves: African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are under-represented. African Americans, for example, were 12.2 percent of U.S. population in 2004, but only 3.3 percent of the nation’s physicians.