When a health system or practice is facing a staffing gap — whether from a sudden departure, a coverage expansion, or a prolonged recruitment challenge — the instinct is often to reach for the fastest available solution. Locum tenens fills that role well in many situations. But “fast” and “right” aren’t always the same thing, and organizations that default to temporary coverage without thinking through the longer-term staffing strategy often find themselves in a recurring cycle: fill the gap, lose continuity, refill the gap.
The decision between locum tenens and permanent placement is rarely as simple as it looks. It involves a layered analysis of patient volume trends, market compensation dynamics, specialty availability in your geography, credentialing timelines, and the operational cost of provider turnover. For rural and underserved areas especially, permanent recruitment can take 12 to 24 months or longer for certain specialties — and in that window, locum coverage isn’t a stopgap, it’s a necessity. But even in that context, how you use locum providers matters. Are you using them to maintain continuity for an existing panel? To test demand before committing to a permanent hire? To cover while you upskill an advanced practice provider into a more independent role?
Advanced practice providers — nurse practitioners and physician assistants — add another dimension to this decision. In states with full practice authority, a well-supported NP can manage a primary care or specialty panel independently and indefinitely. That changes the calculus on permanent placement entirely. Rather than recruiting for a physician role that may take years to fill, organizations can build durable, sustainable care models around APP leadership — with locum coverage used strategically during transitions rather than as a permanent band-aid.
At Anura Health Group, our staffing consulting doesn’t start with “who can we place.” It starts with understanding your patient population, your practice model, and your growth trajectory. From there, we help you build a workforce strategy that accounts for both immediate needs and the direction your organization is heading. That might mean a hybrid model — locum coverage in the near term while a permanent search runs in parallel. It might mean restructuring how your current clinical team is deployed before adding headcount. It might mean identifying the right APP scope of practice to fill a gap without a physician hire at all.
The organizations that manage workforce most effectively are the ones that treat staffing as a strategic function, not a reactive one. Provider shortages aren’t going away — the pipeline issues in primary care, psychiatry, and rural medicine are structural and well-documented. Getting ahead of that reality with proactive planning is what separates practices that deliver consistent patient access from those that are perpetually in crisis mode.
If you’re navigating a staffing challenge — or want to build a more resilient workforce plan before one finds you — we’d be glad to talk through what that looks like for your specific context.
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