Review of health workforce supply issues

This is a easy to follow and informative review of the current and intensifying global health workforce crisis. Using case studies and other public data, Mark Britnell provides examples from various countries and companies to show how innovation, engagement with new technology and new work and care models can enhance care practices and address workforce shortages, maldistribution and create more appropriate skill mixes. The book includes some 20 chapters exploring health workforce issues in China, Israel, India, Brazil, Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Japan, UK, and USA. He also addresses issues of health workforce migration, the importance of gender and women's involvement in the health workforce, Universal Health Care and AI. The range of case studies provides Britnell with a set of large scale changes he believes are needed to tackle the health workforce crisis. He does not offer these as solutions, as much as ways to examine issues from different perspectives and to be open to new approaches to care delivery. Some of the changes include;
* the need to reframe the health workforce debate as one of productivity and wealth creation, this would be a good start since the public and politicians need to change the mantra from cost and cost containment to investment in health and national productivity.
* Britnell also counsels relaxation of what he sees as the 'tribes' of professional identity and regulation to permit new approaches to tasks that would allow for increased workforce supply, as well as creating work systems that allow professionals to work at the upper limits of their licenses.
*Adoption of new technologies is a persistent theme, and Britnell highlights the potential for AI, Blockchain, and robotics to positively disrupt health workforce systems through automation and task shifting (not shafting), where human skills , empathy and compassion remain central.

The book deals succinctly with a wide range of health workforce issues and provides the reader with a good introduction to new models and approaches of health care. It was published in 2019, before the Global COVID-19 pandemic, but this has only made many of the issues Britnell highlights more acute, and has likely accelerated many of the innovative and disruptive approaches to healthcare that he promotes (such as telehealth).

Britnell is a Global health care expert with KPMG international, and while at times the book can see like a sales pitch for KPMG heath solutions, this is understandable considering the system thinking needed to address many of these health workforce issues. Britnell's previous career includes senior management positions with the NHS, but it is his experience as a patient facing prostate cancer (which he mentions in the book) that provides him with important insights and compassion about the necessity and productive value of fair and effective health systems (he also donates all royalties from his books to Prostate Cancer UK). I recommend this book for those involved in health management and policy, as well as academics and students of health workforce, systems and delivery.

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