Workforce planning: How we think about the impact of organisations on outcomes

Healthcare workforce availability and planning is of fundamental importance to patients, clinicians, operational managers and strategic leaders alike. Despite much attention and development of plans and policy, a definitive answer remains elusive.

The aim of this article is to encourage colleagues to make explicit their underlying assumed models when undertaking workforce planning.

It is posited that, akin to making a holistic diagnosis in medicine, understanding workforce issues by uncovering the prisms of presupposition and assumption that we hold about organisations is critical to generating fruitful new insights. Morgan's organisational metaphors are described as one example of a management conceptual model that might help us to illuminate these prisms. Examples are given of how each metaphor alters the way in which we might address our workforce needs and priorities.