Health Workforce Plans for Australia and Singapore

Running head: HEALTH WORKFORCE PLANS FOR AUSTRALIA AND SINGAPORE
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Analytic report
Health workforce plans for Australia and Singapore
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HEALTH WORKFORCE PLANS FOR AUSTRALIA AND SINGAPORE
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The health sector as observed by the World Health Organisation should be given priority
of a high degree by the nations in the world as it forms the backbone of any country’s existence.
The planning workforce strategies in the nations should find a suitable way of addressing the
problem of workforce aging which has been found to be the consistent problem in most
developed countries. For instance, in Australia and Singapore, the workforce aging has been the
major concern from the environmental scans conducted in the recent past. From the ten
recommendations of the WHO, developed countries should engage in intensive education and
training of young energetic employees especially in the health sector to counter the challenges
experienced due to an advanced age of the health workforce. The Organisation further advocates
for the well-established frameworks that will cater for the future of the workforce in the health
sector.

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Table of Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY...........................................................................................................2
Health workforce plans for Australia and Singapore................................................................4
Introduction................................................................................................................................4
An environmental scan of the health workforce.........................................................................5
An environmental scan for health workforce in Australia....................................................6
Aging workforce.....................................................................................................................6
Growth in demand..................................................................................................................7
Attraction and retention of staff...........................................................................................7
The SWOT analysis of Australian health workforce..............................................................7
Strengths..................................................................................................................................7
Weaknesses..............................................................................................................................8
Opportunities..........................................................................................................................8
Threats.....................................................................................................................................8
An environmental scan for health workforce in Singapore...................................................9
Strengths..................................................................................................................................9
Weaknesses..............................................................................................................................9
Opportunities..........................................................................................................................9
Threats...................................................................................................................................10
Data profiles for Australia and Singapore................................................................................10
Critical issues to be addressed in Australia...............................................................................18
Critical issues to be addressed in Singapore.............................................................................19
Implementation of the WHO priorities based on the ten recommendations.........................20
References.....................................................................................................................................22

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Figure 1 sample workforce plan......................................................................................................6
Table 1 Data profile for Australia and Singapore (source: WHO data)..............................
12Graph 1 Bar chart data profile summary of Australia 13
Graph 2Bar chart data profile summary of Singapore...................................................................14
Figure 2 Density of Physicians (source: WHO)............................................................................15
Figure 3 Nursing and Midwifery Density distribution (source: WHO)........................................16
Graph 3 A comparison of Physicians between Australia and Singapore......................................16
Figure 4 Dentistry personnel density (source: WHO)...................................................................18
Graph 4 Comparison of Nurses and Midwifery............................................................................18
Graph 5 Comparison of Dentistry personnel.................................................................................19
Figure 5 Pharmaceutical personnel density...................................................................................20
Graph 6 Comparison of Pharmaceutical personnel.......................................................................21
Health workforce plans for Australia and Singapore
Introduction
The health workforce is the most important aspect of all government health systems
across the world. The health workers have the mandate to utilize the range of skills acquired and

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their competence to ensure an effective, safe and quality healthcare to the nation at large. One of
the major goals of health information and data is to contribute to the attaining of a universal
coverage of quality healthcare services through improved access and utilization of health
information. According to World Health Organization (WHO), the western Pacific countries are
very diverse in the level of utilization of their well-developed workforce plan in terms of data
collection and information.
The aim of this report is to give an analytic comparison of a national health workforce
plans of Australia and one of the West Pacific Countries, Singapore. (Bhargava, 2018, pp.3-4)
acknowledges that Singapore has experienced a drastic improvement in its health sector as the
workforce effective planning has been acknowledged to be the most improved in its health sector
and in controlling the cost of care across the country. Moreover, the factors that have led to their
improvement are majorly related to the way it is governed and how the government of Singapore
approaches to health issues. This makes it suitable for comparison to Australia whose framework
has been designed against the background of challenges it has been reported to experience
particularly in the national health workforce planning (Gardner et al., 2017).
An environmental scan of the health workforce
According to (Nancarrow et al., 2017, pp.327-335), an environmental scan is a strategic
assessment tool that an organisation puts in place to forecast the performance of its workforce in
relation to the current and future sustainability of the organisation. An environmental scan is said

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to be an essential step in workforce planning steps which should be observed by any system that
needs to lay out a suitable framework for its operation. This can be well understood through the
following figure;
Figure 1: sample workforce plan (source: WHO)
From the figure, it can be seen that environmental scan forms the basis of data collection for an
organisation in the effort of forming an effective workforce planning. In this step, a SWOT
analysis is also made which is mainly the identification of the organisation’s Strength,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (Norwood et al., 2017, p.204).
Preparation of an environmental scan involves the collection of pieces of external and
internal data that could assist the organisation to focus appropriately on their long term and short