New perspectives on the future of healthcare – how is attractive work designed?

Background

Sustainable healthcare requires workplaces where healthcare professionals thrive, feel good, and want to work, because competition for skills and labour between public and private employers in the labour market is a fact. There is a tendency to increase the tendency of workers to leave work, which entails an increased need to attract, maintain, and recruit employees.

Purpose

The overall goal of the project is to contribute knowledge about the working conditions required for doctors and nurses to perceive workplaces in regional healthcare as attractive. The aim is to critically examine and identify what characterizes an attractive workplace and attractive work from the perspectives of students, doctors, nurses and employers, and whether these perspectives are compatible.

Implementation

The project has two work packages to answer the five questions that break down the main purpose. The study design is qualitative, with focus group interviews, interviews and employer documents as empirical data. Informants are doctors and nurses, as well as medical and nursing students. Students are followed longitudinally from studies to about one year in the profession. The analysis will be carried out with the support of policy, discourse, and abductive thematic analysis, as well as conceptual mapping.

Expected results

The project is expected to make visible any differences in expectation of attractive work between employers and employees, as well as what the region, as an employer, offers potential workers as an attractive workplace. The project is therefore expected to contribute to knowledge of successful strategies to promote attractive well-being activities at work as well as long-term recruitment of workers to the region.

Usefulness

Target groups for the results of the study are employers and regions that participated in the study; politicians and employees, as well as educational initiatives for nursing and medical students at Mid Sweden University, Karolinska Institute, and University Dalarna, Uppsala University and Umeå University. In a broader context, we also want to disseminate the results to other stakeholders in the healthcare sector and the general public by communicating the research results in a workshop material for accessibility.