Urgent Care Surges in Ranking of Most-Recruited Clinicians

While family physicians remain the most commonly sought clinicians among recruiters, urgent care physicians jumped from 20^th just 2 years ago to 12^th in Merritt Hawkins’ 2017 Review of Physician and Advanced Practitioner Recruiting Incentives. Given that primary care physicians are the backbone of the urgent care provider workforce, it’s expected that recruitment and retention will continue to be increasingly competitive. More and more, top employee physicians (as opposed to owner/operator physicians) are being courted by multi-unit operators and hospital systems that are expanding their urgent care presence. The effect of that in the urgent care marketplace is that operators may have to offer more attractive compensation packages in terms of salary, benefits, work–life balance, and overall working conditions to retain their best providers—including physician assistants and nurse practitioners. Combined, those advanced practitioners came in third on the Merritt Hawkins list (psychiatrists held the number-two spot), up from fifth on last year’s list.