Northwest Arkansas Healthcare Struggles to Keep Pace with Population Growth

Health care officials say the strain on northwest Arkansas’ workforce is improving, but the area’s continuing growth will keep the demand for medical workers from slowing down any time soon.

Northwest Arkansas, made up primarily of Washington and Benton counties, surpassed 560,000 in population in 2022 and is expected to approach 1 million by 2045. All those citizens need medical care in one form or another, and the health care industry can’t keep pace.

There are more than 1,200 reported openings for health care practitioners, including physicians and nurses or technicians, in northwest Arkansas. There are another 1,500 openings for health care support positions.

“We are better than we were last year, overall,” said Ryan Cork, the vice chancellor for the northwest Arkansas region at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “The challenge is a good and bad challenge to have. We are constantly growing so that means our health care workforce has to be able to sustain at that same rate. Our growth rate is surpassing our staffing.”

The personnel needs run the gamut, from the front-desk receptionist at a walk-in clinic to the brain surgeon in the hospital operating room. Nurses are in particularly high demand, with 352 openings for a registered nurse and 152 for a licensed practical nurse.

The medical community has been united in its response. NorthWest Arkansas Community College in Bentonville has significantly expanded its nursing program in recent years and now can accommodate more than 200 nursing students in various programs annually. Other medical and academic institutions have expanded programs to increase the workforce pipeline.

“It is really moving,” said Carla Boyd, NWACC’s director of nursing. “We know that nursing is needed, so we have expanded to make sure we can meet those requirements.”

Long-Term Fix

Many of the initiatives undertaken in northwest Arkansas may take some time to see their full effect, such as increasing the number of residencies for physicians or the opening of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville.

In the short term, hospitals and clinics — as well as assisted living facilities, public schools and a host of other places that require medical personnel — manage the best they can. Mercy Hospital in Rogers has added more than 50 physicians and 75 nurse practitioners, cause for guarded optimism.

“We have been actively and aggressively recruiting, particularly in northwest Arkansas because it is hard enough to just keep up with the population growth,” said Scotty Cooper, Mercy’s regional physician executive. “Word has gotten out and the attraction of the area has worked in our favor. I hesitate to say that without knocking on wood.

“I don’t want to sound complacent because I’m not; it’s going to continue to be a challenge as long as the population continues to grow. We have had a certain amount of success in northwest Arkansas. It’s a dynamic situation.”

Cooper said some specialties are harder to fill than others, with the demand for neurologists and rheumatologists almost impossible to keep pace with, for example. Cork said the goal is to keep access times to less than 30 days, meaning if someone wants to make an appointment with an oncologist, he or she can get in to see one within that time.

The access stress has led to medical out-migration to the tune of almost $1 billion annually in the past for northwest Arkansas, as people seek services elsewhere. The nonprofit Northwest Arkansas Council will release its 2024 health care report in November and those numbers are expected to have improved.

“A lot of those activities are going to take a lot longer before we see significant impact,” Council CEO Nelson Peacock said. “We need lots of RNs, medical techs and CT scans and imagers. Pretty much if it is working in health care, we need more of it. We are really catching up and getting up to speed. There is a lot of work that needs to be done.