National Health Workforce Planning Tool
The Health Workforce Planning Tool is Australia’s first agreed and official national tool to project the health workforce required to ensure that supply is sufficient to meet demand at both the macro and individual profession levels. The NHWT single planning model presents an opportunity to consolidate and build on previous national health workforce planning work, leading to national innovation and improvements in projection methodology and data.
The model has been designed to be used by jurisdictions, their constituent health services and other stakeholders to enable planning at state/territory and local levels in an agreed nationally consistent manner. This significant achievement will assist all levels of government and organisations with an interest in health workforce planning. The key principle employed is the use of shared methodologies and data sets to achieve greater data quality and integrity.
The tool, with its easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), is used by jurisdictional workforce planners, pre-populated with relevant jurisdictional and de-identified national data. Workforce planners have the ability to import their own data sets into the tool via the provided input template and localise their inputs via the input file and within the tool itself to run a range of scenarios by adjusting key variables that they believe have a greater or lesser impact on their workforces. The tool also allows workforce planners to filter the total workforce supply file data by specialty and work setting to complete a range of projections based on factors such as exit rates and in-migration.
This screenshot displays examples of the tool’s functionality for a hypothetical workforce from the summary tab. You will notice some of the variables that can be adjusted at the bottom of the GUI. Please note that the input file allows for even greater customisation.
Click the thumbnail to enlarge.
Specific data items that can be manipulated include:
- Average hours worked per week by age and gender
- Annual workforce turnover, subdivided by age and gender
- Migration (interstate and overseas)
- Re-entries
- Losses
- Training places into workforce graduate entrants
Output data can be viewed from within the tool as shown in this screenshot. This allows users to easily alter scenarios and see their data instantly. A full data set can also be exported to your PC for easier manipulation.
Click the thumbnail to enlarge.
This tool has the potential to benefit government and non-government organisations alike, and it is in this spirit that the National Health Workforce Taskforce is offering this tool to health services and related health organisations that undertake detailed workforce planning. A more detailed Information Guide is available for your information.
If your organisation would like to receive a copy of this software on CD, please complete the Health Workforce Planning Tool Request Form below..
It is intended that the tool will be dynamic and further refined based on feedback from users over time. Your ongoing feedback on the tool would therefore be appreciated and can be forwarded to taskforce@nhwt.gov.au.
Resources
HWPT Information Guide 2008 (pdf, 265k)
