The Cost of Medical and Nursing Education: Managerial Challenges and Policy Implications

Doctors’ and nurses’ skill sets play a critical role in ensuring health services quality; but whereas by now it is standard practice to assess other components of health expenditure in terms of cost-effectiveness, this principle is not commonly used with reference to the investments in the education of health professionals. A major obstacle to the measurement of cost-effectiveness in this area is the challenge associated to the estimation of costs, since educational processes take place to a large extent alongside clinical research and health services provision. The volume is the result of a study on the cost of medical and nursing education commissioned by the World Health Organization and funded by the European Commission. First, the state of the art of the international literature on costing the education of health professionals is reviewed in detail. Then the volume presents the results of a pilot study analyzing all the relevant educational institutions in the Republic of Moldova, and based on these results it highlights the informational value of cost data for both health policy choices and the management decisions of the institutions tasked with the education of doctors and nurses.