title: Demographic factors associated with physician staffing in rural areas: the experience of the National Health Service Corps.
abstract: To determine which demographic factors favor rural communities obtaining physicians, county characteristics of National Health Service Corps sites are analyzed. Through the use of a difference of means test, sites which were staffed at least once are compared with sites which were never able to obtain physicians. Since a major portion of the sites never staffed were located in the Southeast, the effect of "southeast location" as a separate, binary variable is considered. Five factors related to income, employment and education significantly (p less than 0.01) distinguish the staffed from the "never-staffed" sites. A function derived from discriminant analysis correctly classifies more than 70 per cent of the sites as staffed or never-staffed; inclusion of the southeast variable increases the number of correctly classified sites by 6 per cent. Given the presence of both socioeconomic and nondemographic constraints on rural communities, significant improvements in physician distribution may require that programmatic interventions be intensified.
mesh_terms: D003710:Demography; D004493:Education; D004651:Employment; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income; D008507:Medically Underserved Area; D010820:Physicians / Q000600:supply & distribution*; D012423:Rural Health; D012424:Rural Population; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014481:United States