A new report from the American Hospital Association Workforce Center provides hospital executives with tools to define their present and future workforce needs and fine-tune their strategies for sourcing, retention, recruiting, onboarding and retirement, AHA News Now reports.
"The U.S. healthcare system faces growing challenges--the U.S. population is aging at a rapid rate; healthcare reform is expected to bring millions more patients into the system; and there are anticipated shortages in numbers of trained healthcare professionals to care for these patients," the AHA whitepaper states. "Therefore, the need to start now to develop more effective and efficient workforce planning models (WPMs) for healthcare organizations is critical."
The whitepaper gives in-depth explanations of multiple factors necessary to develop an effective healthcare workplace planning model, including:
- Data analysis to determine the current and future needs of the healthcare workforce
- An overall strategy for workforce planning
- Pipelines, or sources for future recruitment
- A strategy for properly monitoring and assessing the success of the plan
The report features interviews with healthcare executives on effective WPM strategies for each of these factors. The whitepaper is accompanied by an assessment tool that seeks, through a questionnaire, to help analyze the above factors to streamline the WPM development process.
Two February reports from the Bipartisan Policy Center called for increased use of the same kind of predictive models to prepare for future needs of the healthcare workforce, as well as funding for the National Healthcare Workforce Commission, which was created by healthcare reform but has no operating budget, FierceHealthIT previously reported.
To learn more:
-read the announcement
-here's the report (.pdf)
-here's the assessment tool (.pdf)