The potential implications of the national workforce report hit home locally when Dr. Wright Becker was asked to help another WWAMI-funded emergency physician find a job in summer 2021, a couple of months after the workforce report results were made public. Finding work as an emergency physician in Wyoming had never been an issue before, Dr. Wright Becker explained, so she was confident this young physician could find employment in emergency medicine. “I was hired under critical staffing shortages,” she remembered. “Wyoming never has enough physicians.” 

It was the same story told to Dr. Bartsch and her fellow medical school classmates. Three years ago, Dr. Bartsch said they were consistently assured that Wyoming was “really hurting for doctors” and they’d “be able to work in any town they wanted.” 

But by summer 2021, the pandemic had changed the landscape in Wyoming. In a state used to ongoing physician shortages, there were suddenly no emergency medicine jobs to be found.

Perhaps the social distancing of the pandemic led emergency physicians to see the appeal of working in wide-open Wyoming with fresh eyes. Maybe those who were planning to retire felt so essential during the pandemic that they delayed their end date. It’s likely that the hospitals and facilities that desperately needed more staff during pandemic peaks brought in physicians from neighboring states as a temporary measure, and they ended up staying. Whatever the contributing causes, the end result was that for the first time ever, there was no urgent need for more emergency physicians in Wyoming.

Wyoming is not immune to scope-of-practice issues, either. Some of the acute care positions that could open up for emergency physicians are being filled by family physicians who are generally paid less. Historically, Wyoming WWAMI’s main goal was to fill primary care positions, but many WWAMI students are not going into that specialty. For the Wyoming students currently in WWAMI residency, 10 are pursuing emergency medicine—that’s tied with anesthesiology for second-highest total for any specialty. (Internal medicine is first with 20 residents.) 

Dr. Bartsch and the other emergency physicians coming out of the WWAMI program who wanted desperately to work in Wyoming were forced to scramble. Dr. Bartsch did what many young physicians have done in recent years—she went the fellowship route in hopes that her extra year of training would allow the Wyoming job market to open up. She made that choice knowing WWAMI will continue to produce new emergency physicians who need to find work in the state, so the workforce problem may not go away. At least the fellowship bought her some time.