Long Drives, Longer Waits: A Look Inside the Desert’s Health-Care Shortage

Heather Rogers’ oldest child had a stomachache on his 13th birthday. He went to school and came home with the same complaint. When he started vomiting, she took him to the local emergency room—where an MRI showed appendicitis.

The Yucca Valley family was sent to Loma Linda University Medical Center to get treatment, an 80-minute, $1,500 ambulance ride. Another child whose appendix had already burst needed to be treated first, meaning Rogers and her child had to wait.

“We didn’t have a choice, because they couldn’t let him out of care, but he had to get to the hospital somehow,” she said. “But it was scary, because we didn’t get care promptly. We had to wait in the hospital. We had to wait on the ride. We had to wait at Loma Linda.”

Our region suffers from a health-care workforce shortage. Such shortages are becoming a nationwide problem—but here, they’re particularly troublesome.

Melissa Daniels reported this story while participating in the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2026 California Health Equity Fellowship.

The Inland Empire—defined here as all of Riverside and San Bernardino counties—is a 27,000-square-mile region of diverse landscapes that is home to 4.7 million people, but not enough doctors to care for them. The California Health Care Foundation’s latest regional report shows the Inland Empire has just 229 physicians per 100,000 residents, compared to the statewide figure of 358 physicians. And it has just 42 primary-care physicians and specialists per 100,000 residents, compared to the recommended 60 to 80—among the worst ratios in the state.

For patients, the day-to-day reality of physician shortages means more than having to drive a long way during emergencies. Accessing health care can become something like a second job: spending hours on the phone to find available providers who take the right insurance, making regular trips to coastal counties to bring sick kids to specialists, and waiting weeks or even months for appointments.

Rogers, a single mom of three, works in telehealth and has private insurance, yet she said she needs to head to Victorville or the Coachella Valley to find an ear, nose and throat doctor for one of her children. For her own care, she uses virtual appointments for medication refills and therapy—but she currently doesn’t have a primary care provider. She had been getting care at an all-female practice in the Morongo Basin, where she felt comfortable and heard. But it closed several years ago, and she hasn’t been able to find the right fit since.

“Going through all of that process just to get a letter in the mail that says, ‘We’re closing,’ is so defeating,” she said. “There are not a lot of good options. You feel like you finally found a solution to your issue, and then it’s just the carpet ripped out from underneath you.”

Why the Shortage Is Hitting the IE Hard

Kathryn Phillips, associate director of improving access for the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), said the California physician shortage starts with the state not graduating enough physicians who stay in the state.

At the same time, the “silver tsunami” of retirees is hitting health care. About 20.4% of the state’s physicians and surgeons are expected to retire within the next five years, according to a January 2026 report from the state’s Department of Health Care Access and Information.

“The fewer physicians there are left in the community, the more each one of them has to do,” Phillips said. “And that means the wait times get longer; they get more overburdened; and they’re having to take on or address other things.”

Shortages may get even worse due to recent health-insurance changes at the federal level.

In California, up to 2 million people could lose their Medi-Cal coverage due to changes enacted at the federal level by the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” in July 2025, according to state estimates. Fewer insured patients means fewer billings for hospitals, who may end up caring for uninsured patients without reimbursement. More recently, more than $1 billion in federal funds to support Medi-Cal’s in-home care program were put on hold after the federal government raised fraud concerns—a move that some health experts say could threaten future services.

In some cases, hospitals hit by funding shortages end up dismantling certain practices and specialties. One area that’s often affected is maternal medicine, Phillips said.

“If you can’t have an anesthesiologist, you can’t do C-sections. If you can’t do C-sections, you can’t manage complex deliveries. And the pretty soon, you don’t have a labor and delivery unit at all,” Phillips said.

In the Inland Empire, Blythe’s Palo Verde Hospital closed maternity services in 2023. Hemet Global Medical Center shuttered its 12-bed labor and delivery unit in January 2025, and Corona Regional Medical Center discontinued maternity service this year.

Beyond the broader statewide shortage, inland and rural regions have specific challenges with recruiting and retaining providers, Phillips said. The Inland Empire is vast and spread out, spanning everything from bustling cities to tightly packed subdivisions, from mountain towns to unincorporated desert communities.

The Coachella Valley and Morongo Basin can struggle with recruitment, because the high temperatures and rural lifestyles of desert communities aren’t a fit for everyone. The salaries offered in places like Palm Springs and Joshua Tree are typically lower than those offered in San Diego or Los Angeles. The end result: Many desert residents need to head south or west for treatments.

Jessica Bookland, a mom of two in Palm Desert, spent months driving down to Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego after her infant daughter, Meara, developed seizure-like symptoms when the family was on a trip to Coronado. It took months to get the diagnosis after seeing neurologists, genetics and gastroenterologists—and each time, they had to drive down to Rady.

“I decided to try to see, ‘Well, who can I see locally?’ And there was no one. There were none of those things,” she said.

Meara, now 7, developed asthma during the COVID-19 pandemic. This led to frequent nail-biting nights in the emergency room, which became so common that Bookland knew to bring a beach wagon along for Meara to nap in while waiting. The earliest Bookland was able to lock down an appointment with a specialist was at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County—with a four-month wait time.

Bookland still takes Meara to CHOC in Orange for visits every six months or so, about a two-hour drive. If major tests aren’t required, she can opt for a CHOC satellite office in Corona—“only” a 90-minute drive, if they manage to avoid rush hour on Interstate 10. She’s increasingly requesting telehealth for visits that don’t require in-person examinations, and Bookland also pays extra for a membership program called Eisenhower Primary Care 365 that allows rapid access to Meara’s pediatrician’s office in case of an emergent issue.

“To be able to send out that message and avoid going to the ER potentially for medical care is really big for us,” she said.

When Medical Care Is Far Away

Tahmineh Safaie, a Joshua Tree resident, had a high-risk pregnancy with her son in 2024. She has a chronic heart condition and wound up being referred to multiple maternal-health doctors and cardiologists in the Coachella Valley and Loma Linda. By the last two months of her pregnancy, she was making weekly visits for monitoring—driving more than an hour each way.

“By the end of my pregnancy, I had to drive once a week to Loma Linda, and once a week to the low desert, which was about an hour and a half drive from my place,” Safaie said.

Safaie currently has Kaiser Permanente health insurance, and said her family’s doctors are all in the low desert. “We drive down for everything,” she said.

She said she feels fortunate to have insurance and transportation, knowing that some people can’t make the drive. The 2024 Community Vital Signs report from San Bernardino County shows that about 48.5% of respondents said they rely on other people, transportation services, or public transportation to get to a medical appointment.

But this puts pressure on larger systems, like Loma Linda University Health in San Bernardino County. The academic medical center, which is affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, has the most beds in the region at 1,001, according to CHCF. Beyond the trauma center in Loma Linda, it has the region’s only stand-alone pediatric hospital, an acute care hospital in Murrieta, and a behavior medicine and surgical center in Redlands.

In 2025, Loma Linda University Faculty Medical Group (LLUFMG) saw just more than 720,000 ambulatory patients—those who come to a hospital, clinic or office but don’t require a hospital stay. That’s up from just more than 616,000 visits in 2024, according to the hospital.

Dr. Laren Tan, chief operating officer at LLUFMG, said San Bernardino County is among the biggest physician deserts in the state. In turn, many Loma Linda patients are coming from the high desert, low desert or mountains.

“When we look at our distribution map, we know that many are traveling long distances just to receive care,” he said.

New Efforts to Grow the Workforce

While it can take years to meaningfully reverse physician shortages, some institutions are trying to turn the numbers around.

Innercare, a federally qualified health center with clinics across Riverside and Imperial counties, including Coachella and Mecca, has plans to become a teaching facility. The Desert Healthcare District and Foundation recently contributed nearly $3 million toward these efforts to create a residency program that can help bring practitioners into the area.

Phillips, from the California Health Care Foundation, said “growing your own” doctors and providers is one of the best ways for communities to increase their health care workforce—essentially training young people from the community, who plan to stay, in health-care jobs. She points to the opening of the UC Riverside School of Medicine, which started graduating doctors in 2017. It can now graduate about 90 students a year, and last year announced plans to build its own teaching hospital.

“Building out that footprint for education and training is one of the most effective things places can do to make sure it has a robust physician workforce,” she said. “But again, it’s going to take years to figure that out and get that off the ground and then get students in the pipeline.”

The federal government may also end up playing a role. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has a $50 billion initiative for states’ rural health care. A December 2025 report shows California requested $1 billion for a plan to support clinics, birthing centers and other providers in rural communities, along with recruitment and retention plans.

But in the short-term, regions need to become their own cheerleaders. Phillips said rural parts of Alaska and Oregon have been able to attract medical talent by selling the benefits of outdoor recreation and lower costs of living. Beyond that, some rural health systems have had success in offering incentives like tuition reimbursement, housing support or even small business loans for spouses, Phillips said.

“Not many new medical graduates are going to like living in a rural area, particularly if they grew up in places like New York,” Phillips said. “But there are some—and how do you find them and how do you sell your community? How do you make them feel welcomed and how do you build that retention?”

Tan, from Loma Linda, said the system leans on the benefits of outdoor recreation and lower costs of living to attract new recruits. As a faith-based institution, Tan said, the organization looks for residents and fellows who resonate with the culture and tries to recruit them to permanent positions as early as possible. The system currently has around 1,300 clinicians in the practice group.

But competing on salary can be a deal-breaker. Tan said a large portion of the patients at Loma Linda have government insurance, meaning the system is operating on a tight budget as reimbursement rates change under state and federal laws.

“We can’t afford to also pay the high rates of Orange County and some of these other areas because of our payer mix,” he said. “Medicare and Medicaid continue to cut back on payments, and we’re trying to figure out how to make it work while still serving the community. That’s the reality of operating in a region like ours.”

The growing needs of the area mean that expansion is necessary, even if it’s difficult to balance. In 2024, Loma Linda University Children’s Health broke ground on a new Specialty Clinics building that consolidates pediatrics specialists into one location, aiming to make care delivery convenient.

“We are trying to expand to where we can, but it has to be thoughtful and strategic, because there is a cost to all the expansions,” Tan said. “We already have such a great need, even here in Loma Linda itself. If you’re trying to serve the need in your own backyard, how do you then suddenly find resources to expand?”

Advocating Through a Fragmented System

Until major systemic changes are made, desert residents will be left juggling the health-care needs, insurance and distance. Georgia Tyerman, a longtime Yucca Valley resident, has regularly taken her 29-year-old son, Steven, across Southern California for health care since he was a toddler. “You have no choice but to look outside of the region and make it a day-long affair,” she said.

When he was 4 years old, Steven was diagnosed with Lennox-Gastaut syndrome, which causes frequent seizures and is linked to intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Despite having brain surgeries, medication changes and life-threatening seizures, Steven is a “a happy guy,” Tyerman said, who loves watching movies like Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo. While he is verbal, only the people closest to him can usually understand him.

Tyerman used to bring Steven to see pediatric neology and cardiology specialists at the UCLA Health system, a trek they would make more fun with tourist stops and interesting meals. But he aged out of that practice, and they now go to Loma Linda for cardiology and neurology appointments. As an adult, Steven has had longer wait times and fewer provider options. In early May, she went to make an appointment with Loma Linda to get Steven’s vagus nerve stimulator examined. The earliest appointment she could book was July 27.

Tyerman said navigating the fragmented health system has taught her to stay persistent—and keep pushing. Last year, Steven’s health insurance plan assigned him to a local primary care doctor who wasn’t a good fit; Tyerman left the visit in tears. After unsuccessful calls to the insurer, she eventually found a new Yucca Valley provider through the plan’s online portal.

This new doctor, she said, took his time, listened to Steven and treated him with respect.

“Go to where you’re happy, where you feel like they’re paying attention and answering your questions,” she said. “You’re your only advocate for your child—don’t just settle for care.”