oa De arbeidsmarkt van de Nederlandse gezondheidszorg als ‘patiënt’: een diagnose en enkele behandeladviezen

The labor market of the Dutch health sector as patient: diagnosis and some advices for treatment

In this article we discuss the labor market and job structure of the health care in the Netherlands. The health care market is under cost and capacity pressure which calls for a fundamental change of the job and training system. A meta-analysis based on two leading trend reports shows that there is a watershed between the labor market for physicians and non-physicians. The labor market for doctors is centrally planned, while for the much larger group of nurses the labor market is not governed. Another observation is that bottlenecks are mainly approached by increasing the capacity, less by innovations in the educational and occupational structure. Following this analysis, this article advocates for a comprehensive labor market policy that takes into account different segments of care, that require different skills mixes and competence bundles. We also argue that segmentation on the regional level is required to achieve a demand-based health labor market policy.