Workforce planning for inpatient medical and intensive care physician services to support health system planning and pandemic resilience

The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated long-standing challenges in staffing for emergency health services. The proposed project aims to develop new methods to quantify the mismatch between demand and supply for physician emergency health services to support Health Human Resource (HHR) planning. We will focus on adult inpatient medicine and intensive care physicians to develop, refine, and validate our approach, because inpatient medical services care for the largest group of hospital inpatients and the vast majority of Covid-19 hospital patients. We will adopt a patient-oriented approach to generate insights and create tools to allow policymakers to evaluate their options based on projected impacts on various metrics including cost, quality of care, and equity at different time points. Once developed, these methods could be extended to HHR planning for other groups of physicians or healthcare professionals, including nurses.