Development of an interactive model for planning the care workforce for Alberta: case study

Human Resources for Health

Case Study

Andrea Robertson¹  Stephen Duckett²  Judy Bloom³ 

[1] Health Professions and Chief Nursing Officer, Alberta Health Services, currently Chief Executive Officer, STARS (Alberta Shock Transfer and Retrieval Service), Calgary, Canada;President and Chief Executive Officer, Alberta Health Services currently Professor, School of Public Health, University of Alberta and La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia;Workforce Planning, Alberta Health Services, Edmonton, Canada;

关键词: Policy Choice;    Vacancy Rate;    Workforce Planning;    Nursing Workforce;    License Practical Nurse;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1478-4491-10-22

 received in 2011-01-31, accepted in 2012-06-13,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

IntroductionIn common with other jurisdictions, Alberta faces challenges in ensuring a balance in health worker supply and demand. As the provider organization with province-wide responsibility, Alberta Health Services needed to develop a forecasting tool to inform its position on key workforce parameters, in the first instance focused on modeling the situation for Registered Nurses, Licensed Practical Nurses and health care aides. This case study describes the development of the model, highlighting the choices involved in model development.Case descriptionA workforce planning model was developed to test the effect of different assumptions (for instance about vacancy rates or retirement) and different policy choices (for example about the size of intakes into universities and colleges, different composition of the workforce). This case study describes the choices involved in designing the model. The workforce planning model was used as part of a consultation process and to develop six scenarios (based on different policy choices).Discussion and evaluationThe model outputs highlighted the problems with continuation of current workforce strategies and the impact of key policy choices on workforce parameters.ConclusionsModels which allow for transparency of the underlying assumptions, and the ability to assess the sensitivity of assumptions and the impact of policy choices are required for effective workforce planning.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Bloom et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.