Healthcare leaders and patients can now quickly and easily check the supply of physicians in their local communities, thanks to a new interactive Surgery Workforce Atlas launched by the American College of Surgeons Health Policy Research Institute.

The atlas displays the distribution of total surgeons, general surgeons, physicians and primary-care physicians at the state and county levels, as well as recent local healthcare workforce trends, according to the ACS.

It was designed to help decision-makers understand the reality of access to local surgical care, says Thomas C. Ricketts, PhD, MPH, managing director of the ACS Health Policy Research Institute. "This website allows users to quickly identify the supply of surgeons in their county and compare it to all other counties in the U.S."

Most importantly, the website will let healthcare professionals, policy makers and patients identify and react to areas with limited access to surgical services. The ACS says the growing shortage of healthcare workers is a national problem, but one that affects individual communities in unique ways. Areas hit particularly hard by the current recession might lack the means to attract and retain surgeons, which could potentially endanger the long-term viability of local surgical facilities.

The ACS says it's developing a second version of the interactive atlas that will cover all surgical subspecialties, identify care provided by hospitals and surgery centers and employ additional graphics that, for example, highlight hospital referral regions. In the meantime, e-mail the ACS with your comments on how it can improve the usefulness of the current atlas.

Daniel Cook

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