Abstract
BackgroundAustralia’s health workforce is facing significant challenges now and into the future. Health Workforce Australia (HWA) was established by the Council of Australian Governments as the national agency to progress health workforce reform to address the challenges of providing a skilled, innovative and flexible health workforce in Australia. HWA developed Australia’s first major, long-term national workforce projections for doctors, nurses and midwives over a planning horizon to 2025 (called Health Workforce 2025; HW 2025), which provided a national platform for developing policies to help ensure Australia’s health workforce meets the community’s needs.MethodsA review of existing workforce planning methodologies, in concert with the project brief and an examination of data availability, identified that the best fit-for-purpose workforce planning methodology was the stock and flow model for estimating workforce supply and the utilisation method for estimating workforce demand. Scenario modelling was conducted to explore the implications of possible alternative futures, and to demonstrate the sensitivity of the model to various input parameters. Extensive consultation was conducted to test the methodology, data and assumptions used, and also influenced the scenarios selected for modelling. Additionally, a number of other key principles were adopted in developing HW 2025 to ensure the workforce projections were robust and able to be applied nationally.ResultsThe findings from HW 2025 highlighted that a ‘business as usual’ approach to Australia’s health workforce is not sustainable over the next 10 years, with a need for co-ordinated, long-term reforms by government, professions and the higher education and training sector for a sustainable and affordable health workforce. The main policy levers identified to achieve change were innovation and reform, immigration, training capacity and efficiency and workforce distribution.ConclusionWhile HW 2025 has provided a national platform for health workforce policy development, it is not a one-off project. It is an ongoing process where HWA will continue to develop and improve health workforce projections incorporating data and methodology improvements to support incremental health workforce changes.
Highlights
Australia’s health workforce is facing significant challenges and into the future
Purpose of this paper This paper demonstrates how evidence-based workforce planning is being used in Australia to inform effective policy development
Many workforce planning models focus on using demographic trends to assess future supply and demand; others try to link health expenditure projections with health workforce projections; some take into account role extension and substitution; while others are trying to move beyond health service utilisation to needs-based models, as well as some examining multi-professional groups rather than professional groups in isolation [6,7]
Summary
Australia’s health workforce is facing significant challenges and into the future. The demographic challenge Australia's population is ageing Impacts of this include fewer working age people available to support older Australians; increasing losses from the health workforce as the current health workforce ages; a smaller pool of working age people from which we can draw our future health workforce; and a larger pool of older Australians who will consume more health care services. These challenges are compounded by the changing burden of disease in the community with an increasing prevalence of chronic conditions such as diabetes
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