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Introduction and aims: Health systems around the world face difficulties retaining their workforce, which is exacerbated by the early retirement of experienced clinicians. This study aims to determine how to incentivise doctors to delay their retirement. Methods: We used a discrete choice experiment to estimate the relative importance of job characteristics in doctors’ willingness to delay retirement, and the number of extra years they were willing to delay retirement when job characteristics improved. 2885 British Medical Association members aged between 50 and 70 years, registered with the General Medical Council, practising in Scotland (in December 2019), and who had not started to draw a pension were invited. We compared the preferences of hospital doctors (HDs) and general practitioners (GPs). Results: The response rate was 27.4% (n = 788). The number of extra years expected to work was the most important job characteristic for both respondents, followed by work intensity for GPs, whereas working hours and on-call were more important for HDs. Personalised working conditions and pension taxation were the least important characteristics for both groups. Setting all characteristics to their BEST levels, GPs would be willing to delay retirement by 4 years and HDs by 7 years. Conclusions: Characteristics related to the job rather than pension could have the greatest impact on delaying retirement among clinicians. This study was funded by a grant from the University of Aberdeen Development Trust (UOA Ref: RG14022), and the qualitative data collection (reported separately) was supported by funding from BMA Scotland (UOA Ref: RG14434).

International audience; Shortages of nursing staff in OECD countries have been a preoccupation for policy makers. Shortages of staff may be the consequence of uncompetitive pay. In the private sector, employers in different regions can offer different pay rates to reflect local amenities and cost of living. Hospitals in the UK however cannot set the pay for their employees, and as a result they might therefore incur staff shortages. Moreover, occupational groups do not operate in isolation. Shortages of staff may also be the consequence of the competitiveness of pay of an alternative group of staff. This is investigated using two distinct groups of nursing staff: assistant nurses and registered nurses working in English hospitals in 2003-5 using national-level data-sets. We find that an increase by 10% of the pay competitiveness of registered nurses decreases the shortage of both the registered nurses and of assistant nurses by 0.6% and 0.4% respectively.

The staff Market Forces Factor (sMFF) is the mechanism in England by which both funding allocated to commissioners of healthcare and the tariff that providers of healthcare can charge are adjusted to reflect the unavoidable costs of commissioning/providing health care across different geographical locations. The current sMFF is based on estimates of spatial wage differentials using 2007–2009 Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (ASHE) data. The focus of this project will be on providing a new updated Staff MFF index based on the latest data available from ASHE. This ensures funding and pricing reflects the current labour market conditions faced by commissioners and providers of healthcare.