How to solve the workforce crisis: listen to what health professionals want from their careers
BMJ 2024; 384 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q7 (Published 10 January 2024) Cite this as: BMJ 2024;384:q7
- Mun-Keat Looi
- The BMJ
- mlooi{at}bmj.com
How is the medical profession faring in terms of gender balance?
The workforce as a whole has become more feminised. But women are still expected to do more home care, whether it’s for older parents or young children. Women are still struggling. What they’re really struggling with isn’t necessarily a shift system but more the fact that you can’t take time off because you have to make up for a shortage on the rota. And then the hours add up, and they become unbearably long, with the unpredictability of thinking that you’re going to be at home but suddenly you’re called in to replace someone else.
I hear more and more stories from young female health workers who are very concerned about the concept of moral injury: that feeling, that helplessness, of being unable to provide all the care you’ve signed up to and want to be able to provide.
Migration and brain drain are major topics: a common quick fix for workforce shortages, but they threaten to leave the supplying countries short. How can we deal with this?
You need to consider the aspirations of young professionals who often see it as attractive to be able to earn a much better salary by moving to a richer country. But you also need to understand that the countries they leave feel doubly cheated—by not only losing the resource but having had to pay for their training.
It’s not just the poverty level of that country. You also need to look at, for example, the size and the number of professionals you can take from a particular country before it has an effect. For example, if a company comes in and takes 100 nurses, that would be a drop in the ocean for a country with a population of 30-50 million people. But for somewhere …
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