UK faces imminent NHS staffing crisis, says IEA

New research from the Institute of Economic Affairs has said that shortages of doctors could be thrust to the centre of the political debate when we emerge from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Is there a doctor in the house? paper argues that shortages of PPE and ventilators have overshadowed shortages of doctors during this pandemic, but that could change when normality resumes.

Research indicates that approximately 30 per cent of doctors on the GP and specialist registers are over 55 years old. The majority (57 per cent) of doctors in training are women, which could lead to a drop in the average hours worked. Furthermore, the UK relies more heavily on foreign-trained physicians than comparable countries: 37 per cent of doctors in the UK qualified abroad, compared with 25 per cent in Canada and the US, 12 per cent in Germany and 11 per cent in France.

While importing doctors from abroad will be essential in the short term, within a decade, the IEA argues, it will be increasingly difficult to meet demand in this way. There will be a shortage of 400,000 doctors by 2030, spread across 32 OECD countries. The international market for doctors could, in turn, become fiercely competitive.

Additionally, pre-existing trends could be exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. In the medium to long term, the increased public debt burden and economic contraction may reduce the resources available to the health service. However, the IEA says that there are options to blur job boundaries and tackle pressing shortages, such as addressing where professional protectionism is blocking non-medics from upskilling and lightening doctors’ workloads in key shortage areas.

Mark Tovey, author of report, said: “Currently, the law prevents many dedicated health professionals from stepping up and lightening doctors’ workloads, simply because they do not have the correct job title. At the same time, thousands of biology graduates are ending up on the scrapheap of unemployment, when they could be fast-tracked into frontline clinical roles. It’s high time the NHS kicked out the jobsworths and upskilled its brightest and best, to bring down cancer waiting times, tackle the crisis in mental health and abate the looming global doctor shortage.”