The EU’s healthcare workforce

KEY POINTS

Green Paper

The Green Paper examined the challenges facing the EU with regard to its health workforce. It proposed several ways forward, including:

• strengthening capacity for screening, health promotion and disease prevention;
• exchanging good practice on mobility of health workers;
• reconsidering the principles of recruiting staff from non-EU countries;
• collecting comparable information about health workers;
• guaranteeing training for these workers in the use of new technology, amongst other skills;
• further encouraging entrepreneurs to enter the health sector.

Action Plan

The Action Plan identified 5 key interrelated challenges for the EU health workforce brought about by an ageing population:

• increase in labour demand;
• need for new treatments and new ways of delivering care;
• reduction in number of healthcare professionals;
• difficulties in recruiting and retaining health staff;
• worsening healthcare workforce shortages.

To address these challenges, the European Commission proposed actions in the following areas:

• Improving health workforce planning and forecasting
  • 3-year EU joint action on forecasting health workforce needs for effective planning in the EU, which was to be launched by the end of 2012;
  • study carried out on the structure and training capacities in the EU.
• Anticipating future skills needs, and improving continuous professional development and lifelong learning
  • introducing an EU sector skills alliance for healthcare, to develop new sector–specific training courses and new types of vocational teaching and training;
  • greater promotion of EU funding programmes (e.g. Erasmus +) that provide support for cross-border education and training, also for medical students and healthcare workers.
• Recruiting and retaining healthcare professionals
  • workforce planning should consider how the work environment influences recruitment, retention, mobility and performance of workers, as well as health outputs and quality of care for patients;
  • EU countries should adapt work place and labour market practices to improve the opportunities for older workers.
• Ethical recruitment of healthcare professionals
  • The Commission was to present a report on the EU Blue Card directive by 2014 to look at how, and to what extent, its guidelines on ethical recruitment have been used.