National Statistical Resource

Description and Objectives

The COAG reforms provide funding for the development of the National Health Workforce Statistical Resource. The principal objective is to provide access to a national repository of data and integrated tools to assist in health workforce planning at all levels of government and by other organisations.

Development of the National Statistical Resource and associated Data Library includes workforce, training and activity data to underpin HWA workforce planning and modelling work.

The National Statistical Resource has two major components:

• National Health Workforce Dataset (the Dataset)
• National Health Workforce Planning Tool (the Tool)

The National Health Workforce Dataset

The Dataset will contain detailed datasets related to the supply of and demand for Australia’s health workforce, including education and training pathways. A principal source of data will be the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Agency (AHPRA).

This project will concentrate on changes to the workforce and will require AHPRA and other data for:

• Analyses of changes in the health workforce
  • Entrants to the workforce (contemporary and projected)
  • Student completions of health courses in higher education and Vocational Education and Training (VET) institutions
  • Migration data for health workers into and out of Australia
• Exits from the workforce (contemporary and projected)
  • Retirement, death, career change
  • Non working pool
• Demand for services provided by health workers
  • Demography, including geographical distribution
  • Health needs, dissected by subpopulation and geographical area
  • Characteristics of service delivery entities, both public and private.

The key principle employed in collating data to populate the database is to utilise methodologies and datasets from existing data sources in order to achieve greater data quality and integrity.

The Dataset will also hold data from the Australia Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Medicare Australia Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) and the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR) as well as other sources. This will enable a comprehensive picture of the health workforce, its capacity to train workers and the drivers behind both workforce supply and demand.

The National Health Workforce Planning Tool

The Tool will be a statistical mathematical model that is integrated with the Dataset to allow automated workforce supply and demand projections to be generated for user defined planning scenarios.  The Tool will be used to help inform decision makers plan for the health workforce required to ensure that supply is sufficient to meet future demand at both the industry and individual profession levels.

Users will also be able to obtain data from the Dataset through online interactive data cubes and pivot tables published by HWA. These will provide snapshots of health workforce data broken down by profession and jurisdictions, as well as other data collected by HWA such as clinical placement data The online tables will include embedded definitional material to aid users in correctly interpreting the data and understanding its limitations, histories and idiosyncrasies.

The National Statistical Resource will provide the modelling estimates for the annual National Training Plan in the future. The resource will be designed to provide a set of well documented, centrally available data from which further analysis can be conducted by HWA staff.

Further Information

Deborah Brown
+61 08 8409 4628