There are more physicians and nurses today than ever before, but they are not being trained, distributed, or deployed efficiently, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute in an analysis released July 9 of the changing medical workforce and how it will affect the quality and delivery of health care in coming years. According to PwC, a majority of physicians and nurses is nearing retirement just as the American public will need them most, and healthcare organizations are left with a diminishing pipeline of primary care physicians, new competition for nurses, and a generation of young clinicians who have different expectations about work-life balance than their predecessors.
The federal government is projecting a shortage of 1 million nurses and 24,000 physicians in the United States by 2020, but the PwC report What Works: Healing the Healthcare Staffing Shortage asserts that these projections are built around a broken, dysfunctional medical workforce model.
The report calls for major changes in the way physicians and nurses are trained; formation of public-private partnerships to promote and redeploy physician and nursing programs; and new thinking about how, where, and by whom health care will be delivered in the future.
