National Training Plan
National Training Plan
National training for a better health workforce
About the National Training Plan
The development of a National Training Plan (‘The Plan’) is being undertaken by Health Workforce Australia (HWA) to assist in achieving a goal of self-sufficiency in the supply of doctors, nurses and midwives by 2025. The Plan will provide the estimated numbers of professional entry, postgraduate and specialist trainees that will be required between 2012 and 2025 to achieve the self-sufficiency goal. While seeking to achieve self-sufficiency, the Plan recognises that Australia exists within a global health labour market and there may be many reasons for the international movement of health professionals.
The Australian Health Ministers’ Conference (AHMC) has commissioned HWA to develop the National Training Plan and report to AHMC by the end of 2011.
The importance of undertaking national planning for a sustainable health workforce in Australia for the first time has been broadly recognised by the community, governments, health service providers and the professions.
A 2010 World Health Organisation (WHO) report on health workforce planning notes that,”To be most effective, health workforce planning and projections should be viewed as an iterative process in which the ability to measure and tell the performance story improves over time.”
National health workforce planning in Australia has been hampered in the past by a lack of a single comprehensive data source on the numbers and types of health professionals working in Australia.
The development of the national training plan is a significant first step towards the continual improvement of health workforce planning in Australia and the establishment of a common framework for nationwide discussions on future workforce numbers.
The Plan will enable us to move from short term, year on year adjustments to health workforce training to the adoption of a long term view enabling Australia to become self-sufficient in the supply of doctors, nurses and midwives.
The National Training Plan Overview document is also available to download in pdf format.
