The Economics of the UK Health and Social Care Labour Market

Three million workers delivered health and social care in the UK in 2019, accounting for a tenth of the workforce. These frontline workers were the nurses, doctors, adult care workers, and Allied Health Professions that worked in our hospitals, GP practices, and care homes. Spending on this workforce is the largest single item of cost on health and social care, with fifty percent of the current spend of a typical UK hospital going on its frontline workforce.

The Economics of the UK Health and Social Care Labour Market details the size, occupational composition, geographical coverage, and growth of this workforce. Here, Robert Elliott explains why people work in frontline care and what drives the demand for these workers, details the heavy dependence of UK health and social care on foreign trained workers and explores its consequences, and considers how the labour market for frontline workers operates, how these workers’ pay is set, and what has happened to it in recent years. Elliott explores the reasons for the acute shortage of some key frontline occupations and explains why economic theory is essential to understanding the way this labour market works and to constructing coherent and effective policy.

Finally, the book proposes policies to improve the efficiency of this market and to resolve the problems that currently plague it.

Robert Elliott, Emeritus Professor, Health Economics Research Unit (HERU) at the University of Aberdeen

Robert Elliott is an Emeritus Professor in the Health Economics Research Unit (HERU) at the University of Aberdeen. Until 2012 he was Director of HERU and prior to that a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Aberdeen. He has been a visiting professor at several universities in the USA, Australia, France, and Italy.