Staffing Sustainability

Given the expected demand for labour, the stagnating size of the workforce and the limited elasticity of labour-force participation, it is quite plausible that staffing sustainability will be a more pressing issue for the Dutch health and social care sector in the short and medium term than the financial dimension. In Chap. 3 we discussed staffing shortages in care and related problems such as workloads and retention, and looked ahead to the expected shortfalls in the long term. If nothing changes and yet the demand for care still has to be met in full, from 2040 onwards a quarter of our entire national workforce would have to be working in this sector. And a third of it between 2050 and 2060. Not only is this unrealistic, it would also have major repercussions for other sectors—public and private alike—that are already experiencing staff shortages or face them imminently due to the same scarcity of human resources. Such shortages are now becoming apparent within care, too, in some areas more than others (see Chap. 3 ). In this final chapter of the second part of our report, we look at ways to improve staffing sustainability. As in the rest of the report, we take a broad view and do not discuss potentially different approaches in specific subsectors.