An Approach to Planning for Physician Requirements in Developing Countries Using Dynamic Programming

Physician manpower requirements of most developing countries can often be met by developing local training facilities, sending indigenes to train abroad, and/or by recruiting expatriate physicians. Foreign training and having expatriates often involve expenditures of scarce foreign exchange in competition with other development projects. This paper develops a manpower planning model which coordinates physician manpower requirements of a developing country with its capacity to train such physicians along with national objectives to contain costs. The paper presents computational results from a dynamic programming model using the best data available from Nigeria.