What do we really mean by “workforce sustainability”? In a new commentary for Medical Education, researchers from the Workforce Voices Research Partnership argue that the term has become overly focused on vacancy rates and staff numbers… at the expense of meaning.
The team propose a more expansive definition, centred on sustaining the human and relational conditions that enable meaningful work over time. Drawing on perspectives from health professions education, organisational psychology, and workforce policy, they show that our definitions of sustainability should include wellbeing, inclusion, and the moral culture of organisations — or the conditions that allow people at work to persist, renew their efforts, and pass their work on to others.
As first author Megan Brown, Community Inclusion and Engagement Lead for Workforce Voices, explains, “We set out to develop a clear definition of what we mean by “workforce sustainability”, to try and break down this jargon. We found that the focus of academic work to-date has been on numbers – people are rightly looking for fixes to staffing shortages, but the risk with these quick fixes is that they don’t stick. We need to think about workforce sustainability as a long-term commitment to staff and patients instead.”
Read the full article in Medical Education here.
