National Health Workforce Collaboration
A consortium comprising of the Australian Health Workforce Institute (AHWI) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has been selected to undertake the National Health Workforce Planning and Research Collaboration (the Collaboration).
The Collaboration between the NHWT and the consortium will undertake a substantial program of national health workforce planning and research projects over a three-year period.
The overall aims of the Collaboration are to:
- Build capacity, expertise and credibility in national health workforce planning and research in the NHWT, its collaborating partner, and health departments.
- Broaden and deepen the skills and expertise available for national health workforce planning and research studies.
- Strengthen the intellectual and methodological rigour of national health workforce planning and broader health workforce research.
- Develop best practice and innovative approaches to health workforce planning and research projects, including supply and demand projections and methodology.
- Produce a body of work that establishes the Collaboration as a recognised authority on health workforce planning, data and research.
- Provide a sound research base to inform policy decisions made by governments in relation to health workforce challenges.
- Meaningfully engage stakeholders and clinicians with respect to understanding the supply of and demand for health professions and other issues facing the health workforce and potential solutions to those issues.
Tenderers were asked to quote on a work program agreed by AHMAC for the first year, as well as to match NHWT contributions of funding, infrastructure and/or in-kind resources to the Collaboration.
AHWI itself is a consortium of the University of Melbourne (UoM) and the University of Queensland (UQ), and for the purposes of this tender has established links with the Australian National University (ANU), the University of Adelaide (UA) and Monash University (MU).
A Steering Committee has been established to provide strategic direction for the Collaboration, the membership of which includes Dr Tim Smyth (Chair) (NSW Health), Professor Chris Brook (Victorian Department of Human Services), Mr Peter Carver (NHWT), Professor Peter Brooks (AHWI) Dr Anne-Marie Feyer (PwC) and Dr Justin Beilby (University of Adelaide). The Steering Committee reports directly to AHMAC and will drive the mechanisms of decision making, resource allocation and the scope of individual projects. The annual Collaboration work plan will be determined by AHMAC.
The established work program for the first year of the Collaboration, endorsed by AHMAC, consists of the following projects:
- Refining the national workforce planning model.
- Supply and demand projections for designated medical specialties.
- Supply and demand projections for designated nursing sectors.
- Workload measures for priority allied health disciplines.
- Models for supplementary prescribing
While the first year of the Collaboration is primarily focussing on supply and demand modelling, subsequent years will see a greater emphasis on a broader research agenda.
