Founded in 2010, Wilderness Medical Staffing has been known as a locum tenens agency for over ten years.
As of 2021, we’re now working with clients in Montana, Alaska, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming to fulfill placements for permanent healthcare providers in addition to locum tenens. We work closely with our clients in these states as needs arise to staff physicians, physician assistants, and nurse practitioners into clinics and hospitals in often underserved areas.
Wilderness Medical Staffing works specifically with healthcare facilities that are in rural and remote areas of the country. While some healthcare providers prefer to work in larger, more urban settings, rural medicine allows for certain advantages including more autonomy and less bureaucracy for medical providers, which can be an appealing draw to the areas.
“As we’ve begun to fill placements in more and more locations and work with additional providers, including physicians, it’s become clear that the facilities we work with need more help to staff qualified medical providers. With a large shortage of medical providers, especially since COVID hit last year, it’s often too overwhelming for the administrators of smaller, rural facilities to find qualified candidates to staff. With our database of providers and expertise in rural medicine, we can partner with them to find the right candidate for the positions they need to fill,” comments Ethan McWilliams, WMS co-CEO.
While staffing locum tenens providers still accounts for the majority of open positions available at Wilderness Medical Staffing, the need for permanent positions continues to grow.
Mary Ellen Doty, WMS’s Chief Medical Officer says, “We are always open to growth at WMS, especially when the growth comes out of a need that can be mutually beneficial to the medical providers and the health facilities we work with. It just makes sense for us to help them in this way. And it has a ripple effect, too. Often, rural communities don’t have high-quality healthcare, so by placing healthcare providers into these permanent positions, we’re not only helping the facilities, we’re helping the people who live there, which is very rewarding.”
Since recruiting medical providers to rural and remote locations can be challenging, some facilities offer large sign-on bonuses or other benefits to providers.
If you’re a physician, physician assistant, or nurse practitioner who is interested in a permanent position in rural healthcare, reach out to our recruiters.
If you’re a medical facility in a rural or remote location in need of a permanent provider, contact us to learn how we can help.
