RHO Home
|
Health Disparities
|
Events
Conference
Research
Education
|
Programs
AZ Office of Rural Health
Women's Health Initiative
Research Center
Other Programs
|
Resources
Rural Health Data Line
Rural Health Briefing
Stakeholders Manuals
Studies and Reports
Resources on the Web
Funding Opportunities
|
Workforce
Recruitment Retention
AZ State Programs
Federal Programs
|
Mission
|
Faculty & Staff
Physician Specialists
RHO Home
>
Resources
>
Data Line
>
Health Practitioner Workforce
>Physician Specialists
Those physicians who are not classified as primary care practitioners are classified as specialists. In 2001, there were more active licensed specialist physicians (5,405) than primary care physicians (4,349) in Arizona. However, there were greater increases in the number and percentage of primary care physicians (+528 and 14%) than specialist physicians (+45 and 0.8%) during the five-year period from 1997 to 2001.
Figure 15
and
Table 8
describe the specialist physician five-year trends. The number of allopathic specialist physicians decreased by 18 (-0.4%) while the number of osteopathic specialist physicians increased by 63 (18%) during the same period (
Table 9
and
Table 10
). However, ninety-two percent of all specialists are allopathic physicians. In 1998, Arizona had 127 active specialist physicians per 100,000 population which was fewer than the Region IX average of 131 and the national average of 139¹.
During the period from 1997 to 2001, there was a decrease in Arizona’s ratio of specialist physicians to 100,000 population from 116.7 to 101.9 (
Figure 16
). The two urban counties (136.5 to 116.8) had greater decreases than the two rural-urban counties (84.4 to 80.3). However, the 11 rural-rural counties showed increases in the specialist physician ratio (42.0 to 45.4).
The number and percentage of active licensed specialist physicians also decreased in the two urban counties (-66 and -1%) during this same period of time. Pima County (-54 and -4%) had greater decreases than Maricopa County (-12 and -0.3%). The 11 rural-rural counties showed overall increases (+90 and 26%) which were greater than those in the two rural-urban counties (+21 and 10%). La Paz County also showed decreases in the number of specialist physicians (changing from 6 to 3, with a -50% net result). There were no changes in Greenlee and Santa Cruz Counties. The greatest percentage increases occurred in Apache (+6 and 100%) and Gila (+15 and 88%) counties. The remaining counties also showed increases.
