Primary care physicians — the people we used to call family doctors — are scarce and getting scarcer.

It is one of the biggest stories of our time and, as Rogue Valley Times reporter Erick Bengel found out, its impact has been felt locally as well.

An immediate result is that it’s very difficult — nearly impossible, in fact — for people to find a doctor in Southern Oregon who is taking new patients. And if you do by chance find one through Herculean persistence, the appointment is likely to be sometime late this year or in early 2024.

For at least two months, Providence Medical Group has been closed to new patients except on a limited basis.

Anyone who phones Providence’s new patient call center hears a recorded message: “For callers new to Providence, we are unable to schedule a new patient appointment at this time. Please call again in September.” It was an update from an earlier recording that advised would-be patients to call back in August.

Over at Asante, most family medicine clinics contacted by the Rogue Valley Times said they were not taking any new patients regardless of their insurance type.

At La Clinica, there’s a six- to nine-month waitlist for anyone looking to establish primary care.

At Rogue Community Health, two physicians this week were taking new patients but were booked four months out.

A result of the doctor shortage is that nurse practitioners are becoming much bigger players in our health care system.

Look closely at communications from hospitals and clinics, and you’ll see that the phrase “primary care practitioners” has largely supplanted the term “primary care physicians.”

As Bengel’s story points out, there’s a full-court press occurring in the region to hire and train more nurse practitioners to step in and perform the tasks that family doctors normally provide — such as conducting physicals, handling routine doctor visits, writing prescriptions and referring patients to specialists when symptoms warrant a higher level of care.

To be sure, this is not just a Southern Oregon — or even an Oregon — problem, but it is a bigger problem in rural areas like ours.

“There’s such a national problem with not having enough primary care doctors,” said Dr. Chris Alftine, La Clinica’s chief medical director, “that recruiting new primary care is very difficult.”

Alftine said that patients without primary care end up going to urgent care and emergency rooms for their primary care needs. “Or they just defer care altogether,” he said.

And that’s one of the biggest problems with a doctor shortage. As we saw clearly during the pandemic — when people were afraid to go to hospitals to get their pains diagnosed, and emergency rooms were overflowing with seriously sick patients — people got sicker. And when they finally did get an appointment or went to the emergency room, their conditions often required more serious interventions.

This is a problem without a quick fix. We will have to get used to having nurse practitioners and physician assistants be the front line practitioners we see when we go to the “doctor.”

And we will have to trust — hope? — that these practitioners are in communication with supervising physicians who can check their work and their diagnoses. Because let’s face it, folks. Nurse practitioners are not doctors. They have much less schooling and far less vigorous training.

For better or worse, this is the new model of health care, and in some ways, we will all be guinea pigs together as the system works itself out.