Introduction
There are serious data gaps in the health workforce, and filling these gaps is essential to create an effective workforce plan. To understand the quantity and types of health professionals, as well as where they work and in what jobs, data is required. Data is needed to assist in answering issues like how many service providers a country needs, what sorts of service providers may be employed to satisfy this requirement, and if there is enough educational capacity to teach them in order to support the continuous transformation of the healthcare system (Weller-Newton et al., 2021).
Data in Healthcare
Organizations and healthcare groups have to develop more comprehensive datasets and how these datasets may be made available to academics, policymakers, and planners. This should include encouraging organizations and institutions to create national databases that can be shared and accessible by the Health Resources and Services Administration as well as independent researchers and nursing groups (Weller-Newton et al., 2021). Otherwise, building a workforce strategy to replace nurse educators who will retire within the next ten years will become a serious issue.
Workforce planning is the practice of predicting the skillsets required for future success. Developing the present personnel profile, determining future workforce needs, and filling gaps are all phases in this process. This method aids healthcare organizations in identifying not just workforce requirements but also the critical strategies, goals, procedures, and behaviors required to effect positive change (Weller-Newton et al., 2021). The planning process also assists healthcare organizations in determining the degree of competency required to fulfill their vision, goals, and purpose, as well as the financial management required to meet those objectives (Deasy et al., 2021).
The first step in building successful workforce planning is to analyze an organization’s workforce statistics. This will give a clearer idea of future requirements, how the evolving healthcare landscape will affect workplaces and how personnel does their jobs or offer patient care (Deasy et al., 2021). Current workforce demographics, projected future workforce demands, and variables impacting the statistics, such as the change to multidisciplinary collective care, should all be included in this workforce data (Weller-Newton et al., 2021). It is critical to comprehend why staff turnover is a concern. Evaluation of employee feedback outcomes and how they explain staff turnover, year-one turnover, and retention is another key topic (Deasy et al., 2021). The competencies necessary for each role should be carefully examined by health organizations. These skills — or a lack thereof — can influence whether or not a workforce plan is effective.
Collecting this data in nursing education is critically important to implement workforce planning. Including these statistics can increase the sophistication of workforce planning and advocate necessary social and healthcare politics. This, however, should be done in close cooperation with all levels of nursing education specialists. The data used for workforce planning can significantly shape nursing education, its policies, and outcomes.
The most crucial aspect of developing a workforce planning strategy is obtaining cooperation from top management or key stakeholders who will support the process. Communication with the staff is another important aspect of establishing a successful plan. This means open discussion of any workforce planning information or data that may have an influence on roles and responsibilities. It can be changing workforce demographics, attempts to focus on multidisciplinary team care, or other organizational changes affecting how patients are handled (Deasy et al., 2021).
Conclusion
Thus, workforce planning data, a crucial component in the healthcare system’s future, should contain current workforce demographics, estimated future workforce demands, and elements affecting the demographics. It is also equally important to grant access to these datasets to policymakers and other organizations (such as nursing groups and independent researchers) and advocate sophisticated workforce planning in nursing education.
References
Deasy, C., O Loughlin, C., Markey, K., O Donnell, C., Murphy Tighe, S., Doody, O., & Meskell, P. (2021). Effective workforce planning: Understanding final‐year nursing and midwifery students’ intentions to migrate after graduation. Journal of Nursing Management, 29(2), 220-228.
Weller-Newton, J. M., Phillips, C., Roche, M. A., McGillion, A., Mapes, J., Dufty, T., & Haines, S. (2021). Datasets to support workforce planning in nursing: A scoping review. Collegian, 28(3), 324-332.