The Health Workforce Plan 2023/24

The 2023/24 Health Workforce Plan was our first. In launching our next Plan, we have evaluated how we went at delivering on our commitments.

We delivered completely on 35 of the initiatives that we committed to deliver in 2023/2024; with another 25 delivered in part. A full evaluation of the 2023/24 Plan is published alongside this Plan – but a summary is:

We have learned from last year’s Plan in developing the initiatives in this Plan, including reflecting on the kinds of initiatives which tended to deliver and those which did not. We delivered some significant achievements:

• Launched New Zealand’s first cardiac sonography programme
• Enrolled 121 nurse practitioners in the Nurse Practitioner Training Programme
• Expanded the Voluntary Bonding Scheme
• Engaged 534 Pacific students in the Aniva Future Nurse Leaders Programme
  
• Scaled to train 239 GP trainees
• Funded 80 more pharmacist prescriber training places

Reflecting on our last Workforce Plan and changes to our workforce over the past year, we have more learnings on what works and what hasn’t. The successes of our Workforce Plan and workforce system have been:

• Influencing tertiary education capacity, often through soft levers (working together) rather than hard levers (funding, policy change).
• Changes to operational policy settings – such as funding for internationally-qualified nurses to register here – and supporting changes to system policy settings (like medical school caps and immigration settings).
• Direct contributions to frontline capacity to train and grow our workforce, like investing in new training roles.

In other areas we need more time to advance other actions:

• Devolved, local pilots need support with pace: while potentially high-impact, they took more time than we expected to roll out and make a difference for our communities. Experience tells us that pilots often fail to achieve scale if not set up well.
• Funding new workforce programmes without strong existing providers or relationships has seen limited success. Scaling initiatives we already have (like GP training) has proven more successful.
• Delivering large, national projects – such as our Leadership Institute – have been slower than we would like in an environment where there is much organisation change. However, these areas have progressed and offer opportunities for system change, and we intend to continue to advance them.

We are taking these lessons forward into this Plan, moving away from approaches which didn’t work in 2023/24.

Details on delivery against each initiative are available below: