Towards best practice in national health workforce planning

Health Workforce Australia (HWA) was established by the Council of Australian Governments through its 2008 National Partnership Agreement on Hospital and Health Workforce Reform, as the national agency to progress health workforce reform and address the challenges of providing a skilled, innovative and flexible health workforce in Australia. The Australian Health Ministers' Conference commissioned HWA to undertake a workforce planning exercise for doctors, nurses and midwives over a planning horizon to 2025. Health Workforce 2025 (HW 2025) was conducted in two phases: developing projections for the size and type of the health workforce (doctors, nurses and midwives) needed to meet future service requirements from 2012 to 2025; and modelling the training pipeline necessary to meet the size and type of this health workforce. HWA has used a number of key principles in developing HW 2025 to ensure the projections are robust and able to be applied nationally. HW 2025 is not a one-off project. Projections will be updated as new data become available, and methodology and assumptions underpinning the projections will be periodically reviewed. To also ensure the continued improvement of national health workforce planning, HWA is pursuing other areas for improvement, including better national data collections and improved estimation methodology for demand. Results of HW 2025 were presented to the Australian Health Ministers (through the Standing Council on Health) in April 2012.