  Many countries faced challenges in their health workforce supply like
impending retirement waves, negative population growth, or a suboptimal
distribution of resources across medical sectors even before the pandemic
struck. Current quantitative models are often of limited usability as they
either require extensive individual-level data to be properly calibrated or (in
the absence of such data) become too simplistic to capture key demographic
changes or disruptive epidemiological shocks like the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. We
propose a novel population-dynamical and stock-flow-consistent approach to
health workforce supply forecasting that is complex enough to address
dynamically changing behaviors while requiring only publicly available
timeseries data for complete calibration. We demonstrate the usefulness of this
model by applying it to 21 European countries to forecast the supply of
generalist and specialist physicians until 2040, as well as how Covid-related
mortality and increased healthcare utilization might impact this supply.
Compared to staffing levels required to keep the physician density constant at
2019 levels, we find that in many countries there is indeed a significant trend
toward decreasing density for generalist physicians at the expense of
increasing densities for specialists. The trends for specialists are
exacerbated in many Southern and Eastern European countries by expectations of
negative population growth. Compared to the expected demographic changes in the
population and the health workforce, we expect a limited impact of Covid on
these trends even under conservative modelling assumptions. It is of the utmost
importance to devise tools for decision makers to influence the allocation and
supply of physicians across fields and sectors to combat these imbalances.
