On 30 September each year the Medical Workforce Unit of the Royal College of Physicians of London (RCP) undertakes a census of consultant physicians on behalf of the Federation of Medical Royal Colleges of the UK. The 16th census collated responses (online or hard copy) and confirmed or supplemented data from other sources including specialist societies and Human Resources departments within tr...

As the growing human resource (HR) shortage continues to affect healthcare organizations, new approaches are explored to shift traditionally reactive hiring practices into proactive gear. To help quantitative forecasting data drive recruitment planning, six Ontario healthcare organizations and one academic partner teamed up to investigate the applicability of an Excel-based forecasting tool, th...

Health professionals providing health-care services must have the relevant competencies and clinical experiences needed to improve population health outcomes in different contexts. Current models of health profession education often fail to produce a fit-for-purpose workforce ready and willing to provide relevant, quality care to underserved communities. Evidence is emerging that community-enga...

The International Council of Nurses (ICN) has repeatedly expressed grave concern regarding theworldwide shortage of nurses and the lack of progress in addressing the supply and utilisation of nurses. The factors contributing to the nursing shortage seem to be very similar worldwide, including the ageing workforce, the reduction in student intake, poor workforce planning, the changing work clima...

Despite the well established policy of ‘shifting’ care from hospitals to the community[1], the overall proportion of nursing staff employed to provide general nursing care to people in their own homes has changed little. Specifically, the number of District Nurses is reported to have decreased by 40% in the last decade[2]. In this Policy+, we review data on the district nursing workforce, look ...

Many optimization models are limited with respect to the management of inconsistency between the optimization goals. As consequence, these models in many cases achieve results that are optimal for the model but not for the problem. In real world problems the optimization goals are usually partly conflicting. Independence of goals as precondition usually does not hold and utility functions based...

This survey was conducted in all 28 New Zealand District Health Boards with a response rate of 100%. The Clinical Directors of Departments of Anaesthesia were asked to quantify their current anaesthesia service delivery and to assess their workforce level. Over half of the District Health Boards reported understaffing, fifty percent occurring in hospitals of provincial cities or towns with an i...

Background Good drug regulation requires an effective system for monitoring and inspection of manufacturing and sales units. In India, despite widespread agreement on this principle, ongoing shortages of drug inspectors have been identified by national committees since 1975. The growth of India’s pharmaceutical industry and its large export market makes the problem more acute.   Methods The foc...

Nowadays, the necessity of manufacturers’ response to their customers’ needs and their fields of activities have extended widely. The cellular manufacturing systems have adopted reduced costs from mass-production systems and high flexibility from job-shop manufacturing systems, and therefore, they are very popular in modern manufacturing environments. Manufacturing systems, in addit...