Indian Health Service careers

The Indian Health Service cares for roughly 2.8 million of the nation's estimated 3.7 million American Indians and Alaska Natives, members of 574 federally recognized tribes. Most of the people it serves live on or near reservations and in rural communities, mostly in the western United States and Alaska. It's a federal agency inside the Department of Health and Human Services, and its legal footing goes back more than a century, to the Snyder Act of 1921. Its stated mission is a partnership with American Indian and Alaska Native people to raise their physical, mental, social, and spiritual health to the highest level.

The delivery system splits in two. IHS itself operates 21 hospitals, 53 health centers, and 25 health stations, while another 22 hospitals, 330 health centers, 76 health stations, and 146 Alaska village clinics run under self-determination contracts, which means the tribes, not IHS, operate those sites. There are also 41 urban Indian health projects. On the federal side, the clinical workforce includes about 2,149 nurses, 767 physicians, 790 pharmacists, and 240 dentists. The agency's own measure of the work is blunt: life expectancy for the people it serves has risen about 10 years since 1973, and at 65.2 years it still trails the general population by more than a decade. That gap is the job.