Health Workforce New Zealand has today released two Workforce Planning reports, "Health of the Health Workforce 2013-2014" and "The Role of Health Workforce New Zealand". Particularly interesting in these reports is the recognition that traditional approaches to Workforce Planning don't work in the context of a changing external environment:
“Traditional workforce forecasting will not serve us well when we plan for a workforce to meet this demand. Experience shows that it is unhelpful to try to estimate the number of health practitioners the system will need because precise calculations are invariably wrong. When projections base demand on existing workforce models, they predict a health care system that is increasingly unaffordable and difficult to sustain.”
Today across a swath of industries, rapidly evolving technologies, workforce dynamics, and consumer dynamics means that simply extrapolating existing trends is not enough: all of the data we have is about the past, but all of the decisions we make are about the future. That's why in order to put the "Strategic" into "Strategic Workforce Planning", you need to apply futuring techniques like environment scanning and scenario planning alongside workforce analytics.
Health Workforce New Zealand's reports can be found at www.health.govt.nz.
