The ability to staff a healthcare provider is perhaps the prime determinant of its success. But recruiting, retaining and training doctors, nurses and support staff has never been harder in Europe and Emerging Markets. Nurses, in particular, are slipping out of health systems like water through a sieve. And their desperate employers are resorting to desperate, perhaps even illegal, measures to staff their wards.

In the UK, about 40% of doctors in EEA plan to leave because of Brexit. And across Europe, a very large percentage of doctors are about to retire. A third of GPs in the UK, for example, plan to do so in the next five years but the government is sticking to its target of 5,000 more GPs by 2020. Then there’s the whole question of the feminisation of the labour force which offers both challenges and opportunities. 

Meanwhile, we’ve heard from a senior executive at one of India’s major chains that a rival has resorted to locking up the certificates of its nurses in a safe. If it doesn’t do this, he said, they’d pack their luggage and leave as soon as they received a better offer. This way they at least serve a notice period. But much good it will do them.

The problem of staff retention in India, it appears, is now that so desperate that in nursing attrition is 70% across the country! Even elite groups like Narayana and Max admit to us they lose 40% or more of their nurses at some of their hospitals each year.

Max, knowing the character of its nurses, who have typically grown up in Kerala filled with dreams of practicing abroad, offers them secondments. A guaranteed post in its South African owner Life’s hospitals gets 18 months service out of them. How does it guarantee they come back? It doesn’t and most of them don’t but an extra eight months work is apparently now worth the trouble.

Highly skilled doctors would be expected to be more difficult to keep hold of but we hear that’s not necessarily the case. Patient numbers in India offer them the perfect platform upon which to specialise and develop their skills, and savvy professionalised HR departments, are now developing the stock option remuneration packages typical of the corporate world.

Doctors also usually have more family commitments than freshly graduated nurses and are more susceptible to the call of home. In Europe, a Spanish group offers footballer style relocation packages to get radiologists to move to Australia. In the Middle East, the oil crisis is emptying bank accounts and depleting the options of recruiters; many doctors would rather stay at home. NMC reckons that Indian doctors can now make almost as much at home!

The HR conundrum is universal and it’s clear the solution requires some creative thinking from managers. This month we’re revealing what we believe is best practice when it comes to recruitment, retention and training. We report on practical tips, actions and strategies. Not a moment too soon.