Health workforce
report
Health workforce
Research report
This research report presents the findings of the commissioned study which examined issues impacting on the health workforce including the supply of, and demand for, health workforce professionals and propose solutions to ensure the continued delivery of quality healthcare over the next 10 years.
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Australia is experiencing workforce shortages across a number of health professions despite a significant and growing reliance on overseas trained health workers. The shortages are even more acute in rural and remote areas and in certain special needs sectors.
With developing technology, growing community expectations and population ageing, the demand for health workforce services will increase while the labour market will tighten. New models of care will also be required.
Expenditure on health care is already 9.7 per cent of GDP and is increasing. Even so, there will be a need to train more health workers. There will also be benefits in improving the retention and re-entry to the workforce of qualified health workers.
It is critical to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the available health workforce, and to improve its distribution.
The Commission's objectives are, therefore, to develop a more sustainable and responsive health workforce, while maintaining a commitment to high quality and safe health outcomes. It has proposed a set of national workforce structures designed to:
- support local innovations, and objectively evaluate, facilitate and drive those of national significance through an advisory health workforce improvement agency;
- promote more responsive health education and training arrangements through: the creation of an independent advisory council; and a high-level taskforce to achieve greater transparency (and appropriate contestability) of funding for clinical training;
- integrate the current profession-based accreditation of health education and training through an over-arching national accreditation board that could, initially at least, delegate functions to appropriate existing entities, based on their capacity to contribute to the objectives of the new accreditation regime;
- provide for national registration standards for health professions and for the creation of a national registration board with supporting professional panels; and
- improve funding-related incentives for workforce change through: the transparent assessment by an independent committee of proposals to extend MBS coverage beyond the medical profession; the introduction of (discounted) MBS rebates for a wider range of delegated services; and addressing distortions in rebate relativities.
Those living in outer metropolitan, rural and remote areas and in Indigenous communities, and others with special needs, would benefit from these system-wide initiatives.
- Integration of these groups into mainstream health workforce frameworks will further improve outcomes, but targeted initiatives will also be required.
- There is a need for better evaluation of various approaches to service delivery in these areas and across the health system more generally.