Workforce and Organisation of Care
Theme leader: Dr Diane Skåtun
The healthcare workforce is a crucial resource within any healthcare system. The Workforce and Organisation of Care theme examines the role of financial and non-financial incentives on the behaviour of individuals and the organisational structure in which they operate.
The theme’s research spans all aspects of the health workforce life-cycle; from training decisions at the start of a career through to career-end retirement decisions. Our research covers all occupational groups that make up the broad healthcare workforce including nurses, doctors and allied health professionals.
Our aim is to provide a better understanding of the healthcare workforce and in doing so, contribute to the evidence-base that informs policies designed to improve the delivery of care.
Current Projects
| 'Come and work here': exploring the role of local community-led initiatives to improve recruitment and retention of healthcare staff in remote and rural areas |
| HERU contact: Diane Skåtun |
| Link: NIHR Award 133888 |
| Exploring the business organisation of General Practice partnerships |
| HERU contact: Verity Watson |
| The project examined how business risk affects a practice’s prospects, and GP’s decisions to become or remain a practice partner or not. Through semi-structured interviews, the research explored how practices, and partners within practices, operate and organise themselves in the current system. |
| Location choices of general practice in Scotland |
| HERU contact: Verity Watson |
| The project seeks to understand what factors influence the location choices of General Practitioners (GPs) who are independent contractors. |
| REAL Centre - Health Foundation Research and Economic Analysis for the Long term |
| HERU contact: Diane Skåtun |
| Link: REAL Centre |
| Remote and rural healthcare: pilot study to investigate experiences, differences, and changes to medical care for people living in remote and rural areas of Scotland |
| HERU contact: Diane Skåtun |
| This project aims to examine the public’s perspectives on accessing/receiving healthcare in rural areas across Scotland and how recent changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are changing the experience of rural healthcare. Focus groups and interviews are being applied to better understand how people living in rural areas are experiencing medical care with areas such as eHealth technologies, access to face-to-face appointments and ongoing care being explored. |
| Understanding choices made through the medical training pathway |
| HERU contact: Diane Skåtun |
| The project follows on from a broader PhD project on ‘A mixed-methods study of career-decision making in Foundation Programme doctors’. The aim is to better understand the movement of medical trainees through the training pathway at a critical point where choices are made over progressing to speciality training. |
| Understanding nurses' workplace valuations |
| HERU contact: Diane Skåtun |
| Nurses form the largest group within the NHS workforce and understanding how they react to monetary incentives in terms of attracting them to jobs is a key challenge for policy makers. In this project we will consider how workforce characteristics act as a moderating or magnifying influence on behaviour in the presence of economic incentives. |
Current PhD Projects
| General Practitioner practices: the impact of contract changes on General Practices in Scotland |
| PhD student: Pauline Ogilvie |
| Supervisers: Verity Watson (HERU), R. Schulz (Business School, University of Aberdeen) and P. Murchie (Institute of Applied Health Sciences, University of Aberdeen) |
Recently Completed Projects
| Enhancing recruitment and retention of rural doctors in Scotland: a mixed-methods study |
| HERU contact: Diane Skåtun |
| Link: CSO HIPS/19/37 summary report |
| LOCH - Lived experience of long term COVID-19 on NHS workers in healthcare settings in Scotland: a longitudinal mixed methods study |
| HERU contact: Diane Skåtun |
| Link: CSO Research Project Briefing |
| What keeps doctors practising? An investigation into the factors that influence doctors' retirement decisions |
| HERU contact: Diane Skåtun |
| The project was a collaboration with the University of Aberdeen Centre for Healthcare Education Research and Development (CHERI), and employed qualitative research and a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to investigate what factors doctors considered when deciding when to retire, the relative importance of these factors and how doctors might trade-off between them. The results, published in the journal Medical Education, highlight job-related characteristics that could inform decisions to delay retirement. |
Recently Completed PhD Projects
| The role of risk and time preferences and personality in clinical decision making |
| PhD Student: Xuemin Zhu |
| Supervisors: Marjon van der Pol (HERU); Scott, T. (Melbourne University); Allan, J. (Health Psychology, University of Aberdeen). |