At NSW Health, our workforce is critical to ensuring we continue to deliver safe and quality care to the population of NSW. It is therefore imperative we remain alert to the complex range of variables that impact our ability to sustain and develop our workforce. This enables us to design and implement strategies to ensure our workforce has the capacity and capability to meet demand now and in the future.
Workforce planning is the mechanism we use to ensure NSW Health trains, recruits and retains a 'fit for purpose' workforce and is, in turn, able to effectively address the workforce needs of the system. This is an ongoing process to anticipate future service demands and supply challenges to facilitate the development of strategies to address them. It is about determining what we need to do now to best prepare for the future.
At NSW Health we adopt a systematic approach to workforce planning to ensure relevant stakeholders develop an understanding of the composition of their current workforce and determine future requirements taking account of the range of factors that may impact this over time. This enables us to manage risks by anticipating future supply challenges to facilitate the development of strategies to address those challenges. We do this to ensure we address anticipated gaps to maintain a workforce with the capacity and capability to deliver safe and quality care now and in the future.
The purpose of workforce planning is to understand what we need to do now so we can develop and implement plans so that we are prepared for the future.
The workforce plan is a living document that provides workforce insights and reviews in alignment with standard business planning activities.
At NSW Health, workforce planning is conducted at strategic, tactical and operational levels and each informs the other to provide a comprehensive solution aligned to our strategic priorities.
For further details on these levels, please refer to Levels of planning.