What happens when the tasks dry up? Exploring the impact of medical technology on workforce planning

Laia Maynou, Alistair McGuire and Victoria Serra-Sastre

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Increasing evidence suggests that new technologies tend to substitute for low skilled labour and complement highly skilled labour. This paper considers the manner in which new technology impacts on two distinct groups of highly skilled health care labour, cardiologists and cardiac surgeons. We consider the diffusion impact of PCI as it replaces CABG in the treatment of cardiovascular disease in the English NHS, and explicitly estimate the degree to which the cardiac surgical workforce reacts to this newer technology. Using administrative data we trace the complementarity between CABG and PCI during the mature phase of technology adoption, mapped against an increasing employment of cardiologists as they replace cardiothoracic surgeons. Our findings show evidence of growing employment of cardiologists, as PCI is increasingly expanded to older and sicker patients. While in cardiothoracic surgery, surgeons compensate falling CABG rates in a manner consistent with undertaking replacement activity and redeployment. While for cardiologists this reflects the general findings in the literature, that new technology enhances rather than substitutes for skilled labour, for the surgeons the new technology leads to redeployment rather than a downsizing of their labour.

Keywords: complementarity; high-skilled workforce; task reallocation; technological diffusion; workforce elasticity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-07-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea and nep-tid
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Published in Social Science and Medicine, 1, July, 2024, 352. ISSN: 0277-9536

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