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.
Keywords: Discrete choice experiment; Doctors; Retirement; Workforce retention.
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