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* Correspondence to: Richard M. Scheffler, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA. Email: [email protected]
1 Introduction
There is little doubt that an adequate supply of health workers (especially doctors and nurses) is needed to have an efficient health care system. Shortages and surpluses of health workers cause major access problems and often drive up the cost of delivering health care. This paper projects shortages and surpluses of doctors and nurses for countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
In the next section, we present our conceptual projection model. This is followed by the specification of our demand model for doctors and nurses by country in the OECD. We then explain our approach for projecting the supply of doctors and nurses.
Our data section details the construction and sources of data used for our estimates and projections. We then present the results of our doctor projection model for 32 OECD countries and the results of our nurse projection model for 23 OECD countries. Finally, we discuss the implications of our projections and conclude with some policy suggestions.
2 Conceptual framework
The demand for health workers is derived from the demand for health care. The willingness to pay of health care purchasers (e.g. the government, private firms, individuals) ultimately drives the demand for the number of health workers to be employed in hospitals, clinics and public health centres. The demand for health workers is influenced by the fiscal capacity of governments, household incomes, and changes in the demographic and epidemiologic conditions of a population (Liu et al., 2016). Additionally, increases in the level of health coverage (i.e. the financial protection available to consumers) should increase the demand for health care as people are more able to access health care in times of need (Winkelmann, 2004; Bremer, 2014).
The supply of health workers can be defined as the number of people, with the skills and qualifications to provide care, who are willing to work in the health sector. Basic labour economics predicts that as wages increase in the health sector, more qualified people will become willing to work as health professionals and more students will apply for medical education, both of which will increase the future supply of health workers...