Medical Xpress November 24, 2025
The national shortage of primary care physicians has been a concern for years, and a new study in the Annals of Family Medicine underscores how urgent the problem is and where the biggest pain point lies: in rural parts of the country that are seeing the largest population spikes in nearly a century.
By studying the location of practicing family physicians across the U.S. from 2017 to 2023, authors found a year-over-year decrease in family physicians practicing in rural areas, with a net loss of 11% nationwide over the seven years studied.
The greatest losses were in the Northeast and fewest in the West. There were 11,847 rural family physicians in 2017 and 10,544 in 2023, a net loss of...
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