Challenges and Strategies in Healthcare Workforce Development (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: My name is Thomas Eretz. I am the Executive Medical Director at Mass General Brigham Global Advisory and an Associate Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. Healthcare is a people business, therefore the workforce is more important in my opinion than the buildings and the technology. Some of the major challenges as I see it for the healthcare workforce today are its quantity, how do we get enough folks, quality, how do we get well-trained people, and skills mix. How do we get actually the skills mix that we need in order to support where healthcare is moving? There are four phases in the life cycle of a patient that require different healthcare workforce configurations. One is to keep people well and do preventive medicine. The second one is the acute interactions, the episodic care. The third one is chronic care and the fourth one is end-of-life care. All of these require differently configured healthcare workforces and we have traditionally only focused on episodic care, more recently on chronic care, but we have not focused yet on preventive care and on end-of-life care. One of the hardest things in healthcare is, or in any workforce, is to provide people with career opportunities, and by that I mean an advancement in responsibility as they go through the years, an advancement in knowledge and learning. That's what keeps people engaged. People like to be respected for their work, they like to be challenged by their work, and they like to be motivated by their work, by the work itself. In terms of barriers for healthcare workforce development, regulations are one of the greatest barriers. During the COVID crisis, regulations were suspended for a while and we were able to distribute healthcare workers where they were needed, we could quickly train them up. Under normal circumstances, that's not possible. So very often the scope of practice restrictions and the regulations actually hinder us from being innovative when it comes to developing a flexible and fungible and movable distributed healthcare workforce. Some of the basic strategies in healthcare workforce development should look at the evolution of healthcare, where healthcare is moving, to make sure that the workforce can actually support where the field is moving. To not look just straight at staff mix, but to look at skills mix, to find the skills needed and see who are the people that can best deliver that. That to me is one of the crucial pieces of the basic sort of strategic approach to healthcare workforce.