Home / The Plan / History of the Plan 2015-2020 / Workforce Intelligence
Comprehensive workforce data captures Kaiāwhina numbers, demographics, qualifications and roles. Role descriptions and job titles are included in standard NZ workforce data. Plans are developed to ensure sufficient Kaiāwhina are available to meet future workforce demands and models of service delivery.
Of the 11 actions in this domain, Actions 1.4 and 2.3 have been completed while the remaining nine are ‘in progress’ as at 30 June 2020.
During the co-design process that led to the establishment of the Kaiāwhina Workforce Action Plan, the lack of available and reliable consumer demographic and workforce information to support service delivery decisions was raised by the workforce, agencies and organisations across the health and disability sector including the Ministry of Health (MoH) and the District Health Boards (DHBs). All parties expressed concern regarding the lack of reliable data available about the Kaiāwhina workforce. This lack of information has a direct impact on the ability to anticipate demand and supply for health and disability services delivery, for determining training requirements and for strategic workforce planning.
The establishment of the Kaiāwhina Workforce Action Plan – Workforce Intelligence Network was a key development in gaining progress with this action. The Workforce Intelligence Network has provided guidance and technical advice across the breadth of the workforce intelligence actions throughout the first five years of the Plan. One action has been completed in this outcome – the establishment of a centralised repository which is coordinated through the Workforce in Action website managed by Careerforce.
While the ANZSCO coding system is the main tool for gaining information on Kaiāwhina there are well recognised limitations with the codes and levels. These deficits became increasingly apparent during the five-year period of the Plan. These limitations led to the Workforce Intelligence Network preparing advice for the ANZSCO ‘review of levels’ in 2019 with changes to the levels recommended to make them more relevant to the residential aged care and home and community settings. Advice was also given on the inadequacy of the actual code descriptors which have significant gaps in them along with outmoded language. The advice was sent to Statistics New Zealand on 7 June 2019 and it has been recognised as seminal work for the Kaiāwhina workforce – this meant that action 2.3 was completed.
The MoH Health Workforce Directorate is the agreed owner of Workforce Intelligence Domain Outcome 3 and actions. The MoH has developed a sophisticated forecasting and service demand modelling system to help ensure the health workforce is well trained, appropriately configured, and able to address the future health needs of New Zealanders. It uses annual practicing certificate (APC) data (issued by each practitioner’s Regulatory Authority, according to a Data Provision Agreement) to calculate a range of factors including age-specific entry and exit rates, ageing of the workforce and population changes. It is, however, significantly more complex to acquire similar data for the tens of thousands of Kaiāwhina who work in the health and disability sector as this group are non-regulated and hence, they do not have the regulatory authority or annual practising certificate data collection opportunities.
It is widely recognised across the health and disability sector that there is still considerable work to be completed in the area of Workforce Intelligence. In 2020, the Ministry of Health, Health Workforce Directorate resourced a scoping report to identify how the Health Workforce Directorate can support the cross-sector collection and dissemination of Kaiāwhina workforce data. This report will provide substantive guidance for future planning and action in this area.
In the meantime, developments continue to progress through the following:
This aligns with the Kaiāwhina Workforce Taskforce 2020-2025 Priority 4: Creating workforce knowledge and data.
