National Primary Care Week (NPCW) 2019 will be held October 7 – 11

This week marks the 20th year for National Primary Care Week, a week led by medical students with an interest in specializing in primary care. The week focuses on ensuring we have new health care providers interested in practicing primary care and addressing issues that many primary care providers encounter, including addressing health disparities.

HealthLandscape builds tools that may be helpful as you embark on National Primary Care Week, providing data to better understand healthcare workforce shortages and maldistribution as well as socioeconomic, demographic, and population health data. As you celebrate National Primary Care Week, visit these tools:

October 7: Building the Primary Care Workforce
Use the HealthLandscape Workforce Explorer (https://www.healthlandscape.org/workforceexplorer/) to look at data related to where providers of primary care practice across the U.S.and compare it to the population. What areas have high population to provider ratios? Is one primary care specialty carrying more of the primary care burden than others?

October 9: Your Primary Care: Getting into Residency
Use the HealthLandscape Residency Footprinter (https://www.healthlandscape.org/residency-footprint/) to look at the areas that are served by graduates of Family Medicine residency programs. Explore what areas would be underserved areas if we withdrew the graduates from a residency program to see the social impact Family Medicine has across the country.

October 10: Health Disparities Day of Action 

Almost all of the tools in the HealthLandscape stable have information on social determinants of health. Visit https://www.healthlandscape.org for a list of tools or visit these in particular:

• The Population Health Mapper (https://www.healthlandscape.org/populationhealth/) has county level data on social determinants of health that users can add to see what areas are cold spots for health- those areas where many SDOH factors stack up are the ones that are likely to have high health care needs.
  
• Similarly, the 500 Cities Mapper (https://www.healthlandscape.org/500cities/) does the same thing but at a census tract level for the 500 largest cities in the United States.

If you have questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. We’d also like to know how you found HealthLandscape tools useful (or not) as you use them to inform your National Primary Care Week work and beyond.




Jennifer Rankin, PhD
Senior Manager, Research and Product Services, HealthLandscape