Doctors Today and Tomorrow - British Columbia Medical Association

• Evaluating health authorities’ physician resource planning targets and strategies annually and recommending
changes as required.
• Identifying short- and long-term physician workforce priorities and strategies to obtain priority physician
resources.
It is clear that the multiple and sometimes conflicting interests of the various stakeholder organizations engaged in
physician workforce planning need to be balanced against efforts to improve physician resource planning. Issues of
political interests, territorial and professional advocacy, and financial accountability all become very real in planning
physician resources. Nevertheless, the productive interplay between different stakeholders needs to be fostered
through a structured, collaborative approach early in the process. Each stakeholder has a unique role in workforce
planning, and understanding physician resource needs through these various perspectives will allow for better
outcomes.
Recommendation 2
The Physician Workforce Planning Committee should develop a provincial analytical
framework for needs-based physician resource planning.
A provincial analytical framework for translating population health needs into physician requirements is needed.
Physician workforce planning is generally based on estimating the effects of demographic change on the supply of
and demand for physician services. However, this practice assumes that the relationships between age and needs
and between the numbers of physicians and the quantity of services provided are independent of other factors and
constant over time. An extended analytical framework that builds on traditional forecasting methods (e.g., supply
based, utilization based) and incorporates health care needs and service provision can be composed of four distinct
elements (Birch et al., 2009):
• Demography: The size and age distribution of the population being served.
• Epidemiology: The different levels of need independent of the demographic mix of the population.
• Level of care: The amount of services required to address a given level of need.
• Productivity: The average amount of services produced per provider.
In the traditional approach, by overlooking the influence of epidemiology, level of care, and productivity, each of
these elements is implicitly assumed to be equal across communities and constant over time. By incorporating these
elements into an analytical framework, any changes in these variables can be accommodated into the planning
process. Moreover, each of these three variables can be influenced to varying extents by carefully considering their
determinants. For instance, in the case of epidemiology, policies that prioritize prevention might be used to reduce the
Doctors Today and Tomorrow – Recommendations 25