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A labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce
BACKGROUND: Ensuring healthcare delivery is dependent both on the prediction of the future demand for healthcare services and on the estimation and planning for the Health Human Resources needed to properly deliver these services. Although the Health Human Resources planning is a fascinating and wid...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2018
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278005/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30509285 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12960-018-0334-4 |
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author | Cruz-Gomes, Sofia Amorim-Lopes, Mário Almada-Lobo, Bernardo |
author_facet | Cruz-Gomes, Sofia Amorim-Lopes, Mário Almada-Lobo, Bernardo |
author_sort | Cruz-Gomes, Sofia |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Ensuring healthcare delivery is dependent both on the prediction of the future demand for healthcare services and on the estimation and planning for the Health Human Resources needed to properly deliver these services. Although the Health Human Resources planning is a fascinating and widely researched topic, and despite the number of methodologies that have been used, no consensus on the best way of planning the future workforce requirements has been reported in the literature. This paper aims to contribute to the extension and diversity of the range of available methods to forecast the demand for Health Human Resources and assist in tackling the challenge of translating healthcare services to workforce requirements. METHODS: A method to empirically quantify the relation between healthcare services and Health Human Resources requirements is proposed. For each one of the three groups of specialties identified—Surgical specialties, Medical specialties and Diagnostic specialties (e.g., pathologists)—a Labor Requirements Function relating the number of physicians with a set of specialty-specific workload and capital variables is developed. This approach, which assumes that health managers and decision-makers control the labor levels more easily than they control the amount of healthcare services demanded, is then applied to a panel dataset comprising information on 142 public hospitals, during a 12-year period. RESULTS: This method provides interesting insights on healthcare services delivery: the number of physicians required to meet expected variations in the demand for healthcare, the effect of the technological progress on healthcare services delivery, the time spent on each type of care, the impact of Human Resources concentration on productivity, and the possible resource allocations given the opportunity cost of the physicians’ labor. CONCLUSIONS: The empirical method proposed is simple and flexible and produces statistically strong models to estimate Health Human Resources requirements. Moreover, it can enable a more informed allocation of the available resources and help to achieve a more efficient delivery of healthcare services. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12960-018-0334-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6278005 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2018 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-62780052018-12-06 A labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce Cruz-Gomes, Sofia Amorim-Lopes, Mário Almada-Lobo, Bernardo Hum Resour Health Research BACKGROUND: Ensuring healthcare delivery is dependent both on the prediction of the future demand for healthcare services and on the estimation and planning for the Health Human Resources needed to properly deliver these services. Although the Health Human Resources planning is a fascinating and widely researched topic, and despite the number of methodologies that have been used, no consensus on the best way of planning the future workforce requirements has been reported in the literature. This paper aims to contribute to the extension and diversity of the range of available methods to forecast the demand for Health Human Resources and assist in tackling the challenge of translating healthcare services to workforce requirements. METHODS: A method to empirically quantify the relation between healthcare services and Health Human Resources requirements is proposed. For each one of the three groups of specialties identified—Surgical specialties, Medical specialties and Diagnostic specialties (e.g., pathologists)—a Labor Requirements Function relating the number of physicians with a set of specialty-specific workload and capital variables is developed. This approach, which assumes that health managers and decision-makers control the labor levels more easily than they control the amount of healthcare services demanded, is then applied to a panel dataset comprising information on 142 public hospitals, during a 12-year period. RESULTS: This method provides interesting insights on healthcare services delivery: the number of physicians required to meet expected variations in the demand for healthcare, the effect of the technological progress on healthcare services delivery, the time spent on each type of care, the impact of Human Resources concentration on productivity, and the possible resource allocations given the opportunity cost of the physicians’ labor. CONCLUSIONS: The empirical method proposed is simple and flexible and produces statistically strong models to estimate Health Human Resources requirements. Moreover, it can enable a more informed allocation of the available resources and help to achieve a more efficient delivery of healthcare services. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12960-018-0334-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. BioMed Central 2018-12-04 /pmc/articles/PMC6278005/ /pubmed/30509285 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12960-018-0334-4 Text en © The Author(s). 2018 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
spellingShingle | Research Cruz-Gomes, Sofia Amorim-Lopes, Mário Almada-Lobo, Bernardo A labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce |
title | A labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce |
title_full | A labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce |
title_fullStr | A labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce |
title_full_unstemmed | A labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce |
title_short | A labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce |
title_sort | labor requirements function for sizing the health workforce |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278005/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30509285 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12960-018-0334-4 |
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