Health Education England and the WHO Health Workforce department present seminar three of the Year of Health and Care Workers series.
The Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath has underlined the need to ensure sufficient qualified health and care workers and support them when they are in the workforce. However, we know recruitment and retention of these workers are both challenging, given it takes health workers typically many years to travel fully through the education pipeline. This makes sudden increases in workforce demand difficult to mitigate, as workers are difficult to replace, with few levers available for rapid recovery.
There is also an inherent tension between the need that politics and finance often act on short timescales, and the reality that systemic workforce planning requires a far greater amount of time for changes to embed. We also have to strike a balance between expediting training and entry into the workforce, without compromising either quality or patient safety.
The third seminar of the series will explore a range of workforce planning issues, including short- and long-term drivers of demand and supply of health workers, the range of policy levers at ones disposal, the importance of sustainable planning (in balancing different planning and time horizons, the mix between different professions and geographies, and professional scope and licence to practice), and strategies to plan for these key professions.
The seminar will be recorded, with a link posted on the Seminar series website.
Speakers
- Chair: Professor Mark Radford, Chief Nurse and Deputy Chief Executive, Health Education England
- Rob Smith, Director of Workforce Planning and Intelligence, Health Education England
- Veerle Vivet, Statistician, Federal Public Service of Health, Belgium
- Dr Shashank Vikram, Consul General of India, Birmingham
- Gila Zarbiv, Certified Nurse Midwife, Masters in Woman’s Health, Israeli Midwives Association
- Professor Dr Ronald Batenburg, Endowed Professor in Health Workforce and Organisation Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen