Physician shortage a question of real estate

Sparks residents need about 24 more family practitioners right now, and they're going to need another 30 within five years.

And, curiously, it's a story about real estate as much as anything.

Executives at Northern Nevada Medical Center have made recruitment of new physicians into Sparks a priority, but their efforts sometimes have been stymied by a lack of office space.

It's not just family practitioners who will need offices.

The hospital estimates that the community needs 16 additional specialists in internal medicine just to meet the needs of the current population.Another 20 or so will be needed by 2009.

Because Sparks only recently redirected itself from a future as a bedroom community to a future in which offices play a larger role (see story this page), there's not a lot of space for physicians.

The hospital has a few vacancies in two medical office buildings on its campus, and it's looking at another 30,000-square-foot building on its campus east of the corner of Vista Boulevard and Prater Way.

Meg Cleary, the chief executive officer and managing director of the hospital, says work on that building might begin later this year.

The building may be targeted toward doctors who want to own their own space, she says.

Susan Hill, the hospital's director of marketing, says health care executives also are watching closely to make sure there are larger office spaces available in Sparks for multiphysician practices.

It's likely, Cleary says, that medical offices will be needed in a number of locations because family physicians figure that they typically draw patients within a two-mile radius of their offices.

Assuming they can find office space, physicians find a lot to like in Sparks.

For starters, there are numbers:More than 40 percent of the population of the Reno- and Sparks has the greatest percentage of households with incomes of $50,000 to $150,000 often, households with two fulltime workers with good health benefits.

"That has great appeal to physicians.

They want covered lives," says Cleary.

And the same new residential areas that attract affluent patients provide upscale housing for physicians who want to live close to their work, says Ronda Ill, physician relationship coordinator at Northern Nevada Medical Center.

But while the hospital thinks it can make a good case in its recruitment campaign, it bumps into the reality of limited supplies of physicians.

The University of Nevada Medical School, for instance, graduates six family practitioners annually.Assuming that Sparks stopped growing today and was able to attract every new graduate from UNR, it still would be short of family practitioners for the remainder of this decade.

But Sparks is projected to grow at a 13.5 percent clip during the next five years, and Ill says that about a third of the family practice graduates from UNR leave northern Nevada.

The recruitment effort faces another hurdle: The hospital wants to recruit physicians who are in private practice.

It doesn't hire physicians for its own staff.

That, Ill says, is worrisome to recent medical school graduates who often have accumulated big debts to pay for school and don't want to take on even more debt to establish a practice.

The answer for some new physicians is to join an existing practice, and Ill says the fast growth of the Sparks market means that doctors currently practicing in the area seldom are jealous of newcomers.Many, in fact, are conducting their own recruiting efforts.

The new medical office building on the hospital campus isn't the only construction that Northern Nevada Medical Center plans to meet fast population growth.

Cleary says the hospital is likely to develop an urgent care facility and medical office building in Spanish Springs and is studying approximately 8,000 square feet of urgent care and occupational health space in Fernley.