The Effects of Socioeconomic Infrastructure on Health Professional Shortage Areas

Objectives: The objective of this study is to evaluate the association between income, education level, racial demographic and the number of dental HPSAs in counties in New York State.
Methods: The socio-demographic attributes of the eight counties was obtained from the HRSA website. The New York State Education Department database was used to obtain information about dentists in the counties. The counties were classified as rural or urban using U.S. Department of Agriculture classification system. SPSS was used to investigate any differences in the demographics in the underserved counties and the non-underserved counties.
Results: Counties with greater dental HPSAs tend to have larger populations and slightly younger individuals. While the populations of the dentally underserved areas tend to have lower household income, they tend to have higher rent and mortgages. Percentages of people below the poverty levels are greater in the dentally underserved areas. There was no significant relationship between the number of dental HPSAs and median county salary [r= -0.439, p=0.277] or an education level [r=-0.611, p=0.108]. There was significant negative association between percentage of whites and number of dental HPSAs [r= -0.713, p=0.047] among certain counties in New York.
Conclusions: Counties with a higher proportion of whites have fewer dental HPSAs. While there is no significant relationship between the number of dental HPSAs and median salary or the level of education attainment, trends show that counties with higher median salary and education attainment levels had fewer dental HPSAs.