The Brazilian Air Force Health System: Workforce-Needs Estimation Using System Dynamics

Abstract

The demand for physician manpower is a function of the demand on the entire health care system, which varies as a function of user demographic characteristics. These characteristics differ among countries and may exhibit large imbalances within a country. Demographic imbalances can be found throughout Brazilian society and consequently are present in the Brazilian Air Force (FAB), whose health care system follows a user-driven demand for physicians. Actions resting on assumptions about future demand on the FAB health care system not only affect system performance, but also are essential to recruitment and retention policies. The increase in the FAB user population follows a worldwide pattern that is driving physician demand and raising concerns about effective health care services in the future. Maintaining the level of FAB health care services is an urgent problem. This research attempts to improve understanding of health care system behaviors and interactions with other FAB systems by showing the causations, delays, and feedback created by manpower management policies. Recruit quantity and their departure behavior over time cause oscillations in service quality. This thesis defines a preliminary system dynamics model that analyzes and forecasts Brazilian Air Force health care system physician demand and its estimated effect on the required number of medical professionals. The author used 30 years of data to capture the full length of physicians' careers in the FAB and to predict physician behavior over the next 30 years (i.e., the focal timeline is 1978-2038). With this data, manpower policies can be simulated in different scenarios, providing a new instrument for determining the number of physicians that should be recruited each year.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA497000

Entities

People

  • Ramez Andraus Jr.

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Attrition
  • Computer Programs
  • Data Analysis
  • Employment
  • Equations
  • Governments
  • Health Care
  • Health Services
  • Human Resources
  • Management Personnel
  • Medical Personnel
  • Organizational Structure
  • Personnel Management
  • Physicians
  • Probability
  • Simulators

Fields of Study

  • Medicine
  • Political science

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