Sheps Center

The ACS Surgical Workforce Mapping Tool, developed in collaboration with the Program on Health Workforce Research and Policy at the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research, UNC-Chapel Hill, provides a comprehensive, data-driven view of where surgeons practice across the United States—and where gaps in access to surgical care exist. By visualizing surgeon distribution… Read more »

National surgeon projections may obscure specialty- and community-level variation needed to target workforce and surgical access policies. We characterized surgeon supply, geographic distribution, and concentration across 12 surgical specialties and multiple geographic units. Manuscript published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons. 

Manuscript published in Health Affairs Scholar Author: Erin Fraher, PhD, MPP Estimates of physician workforce attrition typically rely on Medicare claims data, which cannot distinguish reasons for exit from clinical practice. We used licensure data to examine how age, sex, generational cohort, race/ethnicity, specialty, and rural practice location are associated with retirement and temporary exit… Read more »

Authors: Evan Galloway, Erin Fraher, Nathan Tarr, Catherine Moore, Hugh H. Tilson Jr. In 1993, the General Assembly required the University of North Carolina’s Board of Governors to submit an annual report to the legislature on the number of North Carolina (NC) medical school graduates going into primary care. Since 1994, the Cecil G. Sheps… Read more »

Authors: Brianna Lombardi, Monica Jimenez, Erin Fraher In September 2024, Hurricane Helene caused significant damage across many counties in western North Carolina (NC), and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) designated disaster areas in 28 NC counties. In a previous blog post, we examined the size and composition of the health workforce in these counties prior… Read more »

Authors: Evan Galloway Our latest blog post examines the in-state retention of two cohorts of North Carolina medical school graduates (2015 and 2020) from our annual medical student tracking report who also completed residency in NC.

Authors: Evan Galloway Our latest blog post updates the primary care clinician (PCC) index, which measures access to care in North Carolina using a ratio of 1,500 population to 1 primary care clinician (physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, or certified nurse midwives) is set as the standard for measuring access.

Authors:Abhi Joshi, Catherine Moore, Brooke Lombardi Our new blog post presents select findings from the 2024 data and includes an overview of changes to physician, oral health, pharmacy, and nursing workforces in active practice in North Carolina (NC). We also highlight a recent change to the HPDS supply visualization tool, which now allows users to… Read more »

Authors: Brooke Lombardi, Connor Sullivan, Catherine Moore, and Erin Fraher In 2023, section 4.3 of Senate Bill 20 / North Carolina (NC) Session Law 2023-14 (Care for Women, Children, and Families Act, 2023) removed the requirement for Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) to practice under the supervision of a physician if they meet specific criteria. This… Read more »

Product type: presentation delivered to the AcademyHealth Interdisciplinary Research Group on Nursing Issues (IRGNI) on July 22, 2020. Authors: Jacqueline Nikpour, BSN, RN, Erin Fraher, PhD, MPP Summary: North Carolina has been leading the nation in the shift to value-based healthcare, including the roll out of programs through the state’s Medicaid program that address the… Read more »