14 PERSPECTIVES ON BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS | VOL 41 | 2023 not agree to stay in Denmark must pay back the cost of their education. Denmark might consider drawing from the strategy of the US National Health Service Corps, which offers a loan repayment plan that covers all medical school tuition fees for students who commit to a career in primary care for rural and underserved American communities (National Health Service Corps, 2022). Retention bonuses also might be considered as part of the deal, where a bonus is paid to medical school graduates who begin work at a public hospital or clinic after their schooling. As part of the implementation process of this education repayment program, medical schools should encourage the alignment of Danish identity with the theory behind longitudinal primary care theory. An already existing “unwritten social contract” (Danish Customs and Tax Administration, 2018) emphasizes the importance of collective well-being; therefore, there is underlying plausibility for this solution as Danish medical graduates are likely to desire to give back to the system that raised them. This initiative will increase the number of young health workers in-country amid the aging population and shortage of public practitioners, leading to improvement of the working conditions at regional health-care clinics. With higher retention of the recent graduating classes of medical students, the recent controversy over public and private sectors of health care can also be addressed. An influx of physicians to the public sector will cause the demand for the private sector to decrease, forcing private health providers to return to focusing primarily on elective care. In this way, physicians who wish to work in other areas of health care must return to public care centers to do so. Addressing geographic barriers and organizational issues The proposed focus on retaining recently graduated medical students should be accompanied by the prioritization of social equality in the context of health-care accessibility. Telemedicine is a favorable prospect for efficient regional access to referrals, especially in cases where patients have a good idea of which specialist is required for their diagnosis. This approach will save time and resources for both providers and patients, addressing the challenges faced by Danes who must travel long distances to gain access to GPs and streamlining the efficiency of care. Along with telemedicine, a more cooperative and integrated network for health care is necessary for quality treatment, true forward thinking, and better allotment of resources. An option to further reduce the wait time for patients is the assembly of interdisciplinary health-care teams to coordinate patient care through various levels of the system. Denmark might consider mirroring the primary care systems in countries such as Costa Rica, where cooperative health-care teams with comFigure 4 Integrative system proposal for Danish health care Note: Modeled after the Costa Rican system, as discussed in Pesec et al., 2017.
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