88% of Healthcare Facilities Employed Locum Tenens Providers

The majority of healthcare facilities used locum tenens providers to help maintain care delivery amid staffing shortages, according to a survey from AMN Healthcare.

Locum tenens physicians are temporary providers who fill in for permanent healthcare staff members. Since their inception, healthcare facilities have used temporary physicians for different reasons.

AMN Healthcare’s 2022 Survey of Locum Tenens Staffing Trends reflects responses from 202 healthcare executives and managers at hospitals, medical groups, federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), and other healthcare facilities about their use of temporary physicians. Researchers gathered the data during February and March of 2022.

Temporary physicians were popular in 2021 and 2022, with 88 percent of healthcare organizations reporting that they used locum tenens physicians or other locum tenens providers during the last year. This figure was up slightly from 84 percent in 2019.

Anesthesia providers were the most utilized type of locum tenens professionals (28 percent), the report found.

Fourteen percent of facilities used temporary certified registered nurse anesthetists (CRNAs), while an additional 14 percent employed temporary anesthesiologists. This highlights how the number of medical procedures requiring anesthesia has bounced back from low volumes during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers noted.

Hospitalists were the second-most utilized temporary providers, with 25 percent of healthcare facilities using them. This was likely due to the increased hospital inpatient work volumes that facilities saw due to COVID-19.

Healthcare facilities also turned to locum tenens providers to address the shortage of behavioral health specialists and psychiatrists. Nearly a quarter (23 percent) of respondents reported using temporary behavioral health providers over the last year.

Temporary providers came in handy for primary care delivery as well, with 21 percent of healthcare facilities using locum tenens family medicine physicians, internal medicine physicians, and pediatricians. Similarly, 20 percent of respondents used locum tenens nurse practitioners and 12 percent used locum tenens physician assistants, who often provide primary care services.

Nearly half of the respondents (47 percent) reported that they were currently looking for locum tenens physicians and other providers to supplement their existing staff, with primary care and hospitalists being the most sought-after providers.

Almost 80 percent of healthcare facilities reported using at least one temporary physician in a typical month. Temporary physicians covered between one and five days per month for 28 percent of healthcare facilities.

The most common reason facilities leveraged locum tenens providers was to fill roles until they could find a permanent provider (70 percent). According to the report, a quarter of facilities employed temporary providers to meet rising patient demand, while 23 percent used these workers to fill spots during peak usage times.

Healthcare facilities also reported using locum tenens providers to maintain flexibility to upsize or downside staff as needed, address provider burnout, and provide telemedicine services.

Additionally, facilities turned to locum tenens providers to help manage the influx of COVID-19 patients. Thirty-seven percent said they used temporary physicians to treat COVID-19 patients, with 58 percent of those respondents noting that the physicians were very or extremely important to providing care to these patients.

More than half of healthcare facilities reported that using locum tenens physicians allowed for continual treatment of patients (66 percent) and offered an immediate availability of providers (56 percent).

However, 85 percent of survey respondents cited the cost of temporary providers as a drawback to using locum tenens. But 70 percent of healthcare facilities reported that locum tenens providers were worth the cost due to the value the providers brought to their organizations.

In addition, facilities said a lack of familiarity with the department (53 percent) and providers needing to learn procedures and how to operate equipment (30 percent) were challenges to employing locum tenens physicians.

Despite these challenges, healthcare facilities had a generally positive view of temporary providers. More than half of respondents (62 percent) perceived the skill level of locum tenens providers as excellent or good, while around half of colleagues, patients, and administrators viewed the providers as somewhat or extremely positive.