Toward a system where workforce planning and interprofessional practice and education are designed around patients and populations not professions

ABSTRACT

Traditional workforce planning methodologies and interprofessional education (IPE) approaches will not address the significant challenges facing health care systems seeking to integrate services, eliminate waste and meet rising demand within fixed or shrinking budgets. This article describes how New Zealand’s workforce planning approach could be used as a model by other countries to move toward needs-based, interprofessional workforce planning. Such an approach requires a paradigm shift to reframe health workforce planning away from a focus on shortages toward assessing how to more effectively deploy and retrain the existing workforce; away from silo-based workforce projection models toward methodologies that recognize professions’ overlapping scopes of practice; and away from a focus on traditional health professions toward including both health and social care workers. We propose that IPE must develop new models of learning that are delivered in the context of practice. This will require a shift from today’s predominant focus on preparing students in the pipeline to be collaboration-ready to designing clinical practice environments that support continuous learning that benefits not just learners, but patients, populations, and providers as well. We highlight the need for improved data and methods to evaluate IPE and call for better collaboration between health workforce planners and IPE stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Interprofessional education
• interprofessional collaborative practice
• workforce planning
• international
• New Zealand
• new models of care

Additional information

Funding

Dr. Fraher’s work was supported by a University Research Council grant from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under HRSA Cooperative Agreement U81HP26495: Health Workforce Research Centers Program. Dr. Brandt’s work is supported by the Josiah Macy Jr Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the John A. Hartford Foundation and was supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under HRSA Cooperative Agreement UE5HP25067. The content and conclusions are those of the authors and should not be construed as the official position or policy of, nor should any endorsements be inferred by HRSA, HHS or the U.S. Government or private foundations.