Abstract
ABSTRACTAnalysts predict impending shortages in the health care workforce, yet wages for health care workers already account for over half of U.S. health expenditures. It is thus increasingly important to adequately plan to meet health workforce demand at reasonable cost. Using infinite linear programming methodology, we propose an infinite-horizon model for health workforce planning in a large health system for a single worker class; e.g., nurses. We give a series of common-sense conditions that any system of this kind should satisfy and use them to prove the optimality of a natural lookahead policy. We then use real-world data to examine how such policies perform in more complex systems; in particular, our experiments show that a natural extension of the lookahead policy performs well when incorporating stochastic demand growth.
Highlights
Health workforce planning plays a key role in the United States and worldwide
Through infinite-horizon optimization, we are able to model the long-term implications of training, hiring and promotion decisions made within a health care system
We derive common-sense system conditions that should hold in any situation and imply the optimality of simple lookahead workforce management policies
Summary
Health workforce planning plays a key role in the United States and worldwide. It becomes increasingly important to understand how the health care needs of the population are linked to long-term workforce management plans of doctors, nurses and other medical personnel. The challenge is to ensure that sufficient resources are available in the future to meet the growing health care needs of the population, while accounting for the costs associated with meeting these needs. These workforce levels should meet the demand for resources in the present and be positioned to meet demand for the foreseeable future [49], an essentially infinite horizon. Workforce plans should account for lags implied by training new members of the workforce, attrition stemming from retirements, firings and resignations, and the adequate supervision of workers at different levels of the workforce hierarchy by their superiors
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