Webinar: ACU PCA Workforce Networking Call
Community health centres serving one in ten Americans confront vacancy rates as high as 26 percent in key clinical roles, even after early-2026 legislation extended critical federal workforce funding only through December.
Key takeaways
- •The 2025 NACHC staffing survey recorded 26 percent vacancies for certified nurse midwives (roughly 300 nationwide) and around 20 percent for physicians, behavioural-health providers, dental hygienists and assistants across more than 310,000 health-centre staff.
- •Annual turnover reached 24 percent among medical assistants, 18 percent for dental staff and 15 percent for nurses and administrators, producing 22,600 administrative departures and thousands more clinical exits in a single year and disrupting continuity for patients in underserved areas.
- •Recent congressional extensions for the National Health Service Corps and Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education programmes provide only temporary relief until late 2026, exposing the tension between short-term stability and the structural need for Primary Care Associations to scale sustainable recruitment and retention pipelines amid projected shortages of tens of thousands of primary-care providers by 2037.
Safety-Net Workforce Crunch
America’s community health centres deliver primary, behavioural and dental care to 32.5 million people—roughly one American in ten—yet their model of integrated, team-based services is buckling under persistent staffing shortfalls.
Data released in 2025 by the National Association of Community Health Centers revealed vacancy rates of 20-26 percent in core positions, from physicians and nurse practitioners to behavioural-health specialists and dental teams, while turnover rates of 15-24 percent across clinical and administrative roles drive constant churn and recruitment costs.
Primary Care Associations, the state and regional organisations that coordinate support for these centres, are on the front line of efforts to close those gaps through workforce planning, training partnerships and policy advocacy.
The pressure has intensified in the current fiscal environment: although a January 2026 minibus spending package extended National Health Service Corps and Teaching Health Center funding through December 2026 and into later years for some programmes, the underlying drivers—competitive salaries elsewhere, post-pandemic burnout and rising demand from chronic illness and an ageing population—remain unresolved.
Non-obvious tensions include the trade-off between offering market-rate pay to retain mission-driven staff and preserving the razor-thin margins that allow centres to treat the uninsured and underinsured, as well as the challenge of layering new technologies and expanded services onto already stretched teams without allied-health support.
Most centres have responded by launching in-house training pipelines, yet these initiatives require stable funding and coordination that PCAs are uniquely positioned to provide across state lines.
Sources
- https://clinicians.org/event/webinar-acu-pca-workforce-networking-call-8/
- https://www.nachc.org/investing-in-the-primary-care-front-line-why-chcs-need-workforce-investment-now/
- https://www.nachc.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/policy-papers_chc-workforce_jan-2026.pdf
- https://clinicians.org/event/acu-2026-workforce-symposium/
- https://clinicians.org/nationalcenter/
- https://clinicians.org/acu-policy-update-on-passage-of-funding-and-health-care-legislation/