Regulating for the Workforce of the Future: Addressing the Healthcare Workforce Crisis in Scotland and Ireland

The “Regulating for the Workforce of the Future: Addressing the Healthcare Workforce Crisis in Scotland and Ireland” project explores the crisis within the healthcare workforce and how to mitigate this with a focus on policy solutions.

About the project

The healthcare workforce crisis has been recognised internationally as a significant threat to population health and health systems. Through the production of jobs, economic expansion, investment and spending, public health, innovation and research, and economic inequality, the healthcare workforce is also intimately associated with a robust economy. Thus, the healthcare workforce crisis is an economic threat as well as a global health challenge.

The realities of the healthcare workforce crisis became more apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic, where widespread recruitment campaigns were launched and existing healthcare professionals redeployed. These schemes required unprecedented regulatory flexibility around matters such as registration and indemnity, as well as how practice should be assessed in the context of a pandemic, while maintaining public protection and confidence. However, while the threat of COVID has lessened, the existential threat of the workforce crisis persists, with NHS Scotland ‘… struggling to meet ever-increasing patient demand’ and the Irish Medical Organisation emphasising ‘the scale of the [workforce] challenge and the urgent need for action’.

As high-income countries with mature systems of health professional regulation, equivalent regulatory stakeholders, and populations spread across cosmopolitan and rural areas, the comparator case studies of Scotland and Ireland enable us to consider what we can learn from these experiences about the relationship between regulation, its role in addressing the healthcare workforce crisis, and the promotion of an economy that values the wellbeing of patients, publics and professionals. This research will explore the following questions:

• What are the contours and impacts of the healthcare workforce crisis in Scotland and Ireland?
• What are the implications of this crisis for patients’, publics’ and healthcare professionals’ wellbeing, and the promotion of a wellbeing economy?
• How can professional regulation of the healthcare workforce help or hinder this crisis, with a focus on its role in the recruitment, registration and retention of healthcare professionals?
• To what extent are these regulatory interventions reflected in current health professional regulation, and how might regulation in this context be reimagined?

This project is funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Royal Irish Academy through the Ireland-Scotland Bilateral Network Grants.