Abstract
Health care is a labour-intensive sector that has long faced challenges in recruiting, training, and retaining professionals (Barriball et al., 2015; Cosgrave et al., 2019; Magnusson, 2017; WHO, 2018). The World Health Organization (WHO) projects a global shortage of 11 million healthcare workers by 2030, noting that ‘‘countries at all levels of socioeconomic development face, to varying degrees, difficulties in the education, employment, deployment, retention, and performance of their (health) workforce’’.1 These existing healthcare workforce challenges have been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Lal et al., 2025; Nguyen et al., 2025). Consequently, more research on the causes and consequences of these current and projected shortfalls is of utmost importance for policymakers to develop evidence-based policies, given the critical role that healthcare workers play in preserving population health.