Annuitizing the human capital investment costs of health service professionals.

When evaluating initiatives that make innovative uses of staff it is important to consider the long-term cost consequences of training an appropriately qualified workforce. In order to incorporate the costs of qualifying professionals we need both the costs themselves and an appropriate method of annuitizing these costs. This paper focuses on the latter and describes an approach to estimating the expected working life of health service professionals and a method of annuitization that takes into consideration patterns of employment over time. Analyses of the census and Labour Force Survey result in estimates of expected working lives of between 19 and 22 years for nurses and 26 and 29 years for doctors. The implications of different assumptions about the distribution of these years for the equivalent annual cost are identified.