Regulation of the Postgraduate Medical Education

In this paper we analyse three aspects of the postgraduate medical education programmes – financing, quality assurance, and workforce planning – and investigate whether these activities should be regulated by the government or left to market forces. To answer this question we rely on the framework offered by different regulation theories. The approaches of the public interest, contract, capture and enforcement theory have all been used. From our analysis it appears that the enforcement theory offers the best means to deal with this market. Our findings show that governmental intervention is desirable in the financing of postgraduate medical education; to guarantee qualitatively good educational programmes both regulation and enforced self-regulation can be used according to the specific situation of a country; and the planning of workforce via regulation is especially important in that group of professions, like specialists, exhibiting time lags. We further investigate the situation of the postgraduate medical education programme in two countries, Belgium and England, to understand how the issues of financing, quality assurance, and workforce planning in these two different set-ups have been tackled.