Healthcare Professional Education Is Expensive - 1429 Words

Healthcare professional education is expensive. [1] However it is of high value. The outcomes of healthcare professional education are also expensive – fully qualified healthcare professionals that command high wages. However the outcomes of healthcare professional are of high value too – healthcare professionals are the foundations of our health service and our healthy society. [2] Healthcare professional education ultimately produces a workforce and that workforce is governed by the rules of labour economics – like any other workforce. Despite all of these largely incontrovertible facts, there has been remarkably little interest in the relationship between healthcare professional education and labour economics. This is surprising in view†¦show more content†¦[4] Healthcare professional education and labour economics are in essence a matter of supply and demand. However at times there is oversupply and at times undersupply. Let’s look at oversup ply first. Oversupply of healthcare professionals in a certain specialities is a waste. The expense of education that has been provided has gone to waste and now the healthcare professional is a burden on the taxpayer. So it is a double hit for the healthcare service. However there may be a case for having a small oversupply. The future of the health service is unpredictable and so it is probably wiser to have a small oversupply than an undersupply which will mean that patients cannot receive the care that they need. A small oversupply will also mean that there is some competition for training places and specialist posts – this should be a driver for learners to achieve more and thus to improve quality. Moving on to undersupply, there are few arguments for having an undersupply of healthcare professionals. There will be savings in the education budgets but these savings will be far outweighed by the costs of untreated acute illness and chronic disease. However a complicating factor is elasticity of supply. In labour markets supply of workers can be of high elasticity or low elasticity. The supply