About HDRM

The Hospital Doctor Retention and Motivation Project (HDRM) is funded by an HRB Emerging Investigator Award to Dr Niamh Humphries (EIA-2017-022) and is hosted at the RCSI Graduate School of Healthcare Management.

The project is led by Dr Niamh Humphries and the HDRM research team are (and were):

2023: Dr Mehmet Ali Icbay

2020-22: Dr Jennifer Creese (now a Lecturer at the University of Leicester)

2019-22: Dr John-Paul Byrne (now a Lecturer at RCSI Graduate School of Healthcare Management)

The HDRM project is also supported by a strong group of national and international co-applicants and collaborators.

Doctor emigration was the initial focus of the HDRM project. The project began in 2018 by connecting with Irish trained doctors in Australia (N=51) to find out why they had emigrated and whether or not they planned to return to work in Ireland. This was followed, in 2019, with a national survey of hospital doctors in Ireland (N=1070).

The findings were not positive. Respondents described Irish health workplaces as understaffed and overstretched. They described unsustainable ways of working in which work life imbalance was the norm. In contrast, Irish trained doctors working in Australia described the joy of working in an efficient, well-resourced, well-staffed health system which afforded them a good work life balance.

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck Ireland, it heaped additional pressure onto a health system and workforce already under strain.

We continued to collect data throughout the pandemic. In compliance with pandemic restrictions, we interviewed via phone or Zoom rather than in-person, interviewing 48 hospital doctors in 2020.

In 2021 we developed a new method – Mobile Instant Messaging Ethnography (MIME) that used Zoom and WhatsApp to connect remotely with 28 hospital doctors.

We found that the pandemic intensified underlying system issues. Once again, doctors drew attention to their long working hours, poor work-life balance and wellbeing ‘on hold’. They described under-staffed workplaces which impeded their ability to provide excellent care. They highlighted challenging relationships with hospital administration and management and a feeling of being under-appreciated by their hospitals and the HSE. They expressed little hope of improvement.

We continue to share our research findings with policy makers and hope that they will inform improvements to the working conditions of Ireland’s hospital doctors.

In this final phase of the HDRM project, we focus on doctors who work outside the hospital, specifically to hone in on a group of doctors that have been central to Ireland’s pandemic response – public health doctors.