Pātiki and Waharua Kōpito patterns
The Government has indicated that workforce is the greatest opportunity to get our health system working better for New Zealanders.
The Health Workforce Plan 2024 aims to seize the opportunity for our health workforce. Health NZ is responsible for undertaking health workforce planning under section 14(1)(g) of the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act 2022.
This plan will be delivered over the next three years, and outlines how we will deliver on the New Zealand Health Plan 2024, and move towards sustainability for our health workforce in the long haul.
The Health Workforce Plan is a national plan. It’s about getting the capacity we need across New Zealand, rather than how we allocate it across regions, districts or individual sites. Over time we will build improved regional and local pictures of our workforce; but this Plan is focused on national growth.
The Plan also covers our whole health system, not just the workforce employed by Health NZ. Health NZ directly employs around 90,000 people, mainly working in hospitals; but we also fund services delivered by providers working in the community – such as general practices, aged care, Māori and Pacific providers, and rural hospitals. This Plan is also about the ~160,000 people who work in those settings.
The Health Workforce Plan articulates how we intend to deliver on the workforce components of the New Zealand Health Plan, and on the workforce needed to deliver the improvements in care it envisions. This Plan is also informed by the Ministry of Health’s Health Workforce Strategic Framework – which outlines the Ministry’s strategic priorities for health workforce over the long-term – and by the health strategies developed under the Pae Ora (Healthy Futures) Act 2022.
How we talk about the health system
This Plan is about the whole health system – and unless we say otherwise, this means that our commitments apply equally to Health NZ-employed workforces and others working across the system for various providers.
However, we typically have more influence over our directly employed workforces, so need to use different levers for different workforces. For example, we can reshape models of care within Health NZ through clinical networks and how we operate services; in the funded sector, we need to consider contracting and funding levers and incentives.
At times we will talk about primary and community care – by which we mean workforces employed in the primary and community sector which are predominantly funded by Health NZ and ACC. When we talk about this group we include our rural hospitals, though they often provide secondary care.
We differentiate these services from the private sector – by which we mean private hospitals which receive significant funding from sources such as private health insurance. While Health NZ also funds these services at times, it typically does so on a volume basis – rather than as a “core provider” of publicly funded health services.
We are not focused on ensuring a sufficient private sector workforce – but because our workforce can often work across the public and private sectors, we do talk in places in this Plan about opportunities across both sectors.
Why does getting workforce right matter?
A sustainable health system requires that we have a safe, supported, and sustainable health workforce.
Getting this right is vital. A sustainable workforce means:
- We can provide better care – with a wider range of better-quality services, closer to home, and with shorter queues and wait times.
- The ~250,000 New Zealanders who work in health and their whānau will have better lives at work with fulfilling, satisfying careers and work experiences.
- Our health system will be able to deliver more for what we fund – because a sufficient health workforce is more productive, and costs less in time off sick, recruitment and turnover.
- We’ll be ready for future shocks and challenges, like the pressures of an aging population, more prevalence of long-term conditions, new pandemics, and the effects of climate change.
We’ve continually grown our health workforce over previous decades. This demonstrates the importance of understanding the workforce we need and in being deliberate about working differently.
Although we are still working to integrate resources and systems from 20 district health boards and a range of shared service agencies, we can do more to grow and support our workforce to the extent needed. Doing more means:
- Improving the quality of our data, and improving national analysis of the health system’s workforce need – and how we share with other agencies to make it easier for tertiary education and immigration systems to plan to help meet demand.
- Improving the rate of change to models of care – which often only shift when we are at capacity.
- Investing more in workforce growth and in our workplaces, which have resulted in the current state of our infrastructure and in less productive work environments. This makes it harder to grow, retain, and recruit talent for the future.
- Improving the integration of former district health boards (DHBs), by realising the benefits of economies of scale and making the most of the workforce we have across the country. At times, our former fragmentation drove domestic competition for workforce instead of deliberate growth for our nation as a whole.
- Meeting the growing demand for care as our population ages through technology and advances in healthcare to keep people well.
- Working better with global markets to address the impact of global workforce shortages, which have forced us to compete harder over time against other nations for health workers.
If we are to keep our exceptional workforce, and improve the care New Zealanders expect over time, we need to continue to do better.