Attakrit Leckcivilize: Physician Associates & the NHS workforce crisis

My name is Attakrit Leckcivilize, I am a health economist working in the Health Systems Collaborative at the University of Oxford.

My work is around health system and health workers, and also how to implement policy in healthcare. But as I am an economist, I try to look at it from the lens of incentive motivation and human behaviour. So now we are working with the NHS in the UK about the profession called Physician Associate, so this is medically trained generalist healthcare professionals who work alongside doctors as part of a multi-disciplinary care team. And because even though they are already with the NHS for more than 20 years, but then they just recently got regulated, and there are so many controversies around it. So, our research aims to fill the knowledge gap and try to think about how to better recruit, retain and career develop this group of professionals to help with a better quality of care in the NHS.

The big question in my field at the moment, I would say it's about workforce. In the UK, globally, we don't have enough healthcare workers. And how can we better train, retain, develop and also integrate all these able, capable, motivated healthcare workers at the right place in the right time, that's a really big question.

My work doesn't have a direct impact on patients, unlike medicine or medical procedures or treatments, but I think human resource or health workers is one of the most important things, because you might say health technology will come in, but at the very end healthcare is about human-to-human connection.

I believe that in healthcare there are so many things that we can think of, like is it properly funded to tackle certain diseases and so on, but at the very end it's about how to implement this, it's about how we can better integrate, motivate and also make our health workers happy and healthy enough to provide a good quality of care. So, I think to look at them and try to think about how they are going to best serve and practice, it's one of the biggest questions in the field.

This interview was recorded in July 2024.