Health Workforce Governance and Reform

Design the workforce from need. Then ask whether the system will let it exist.

Most workforce planning starts from the professions, posts and budgets a system already has. I start from the other end: what a population needs, what work that requires, and what in the system's architecture stops capable people doing it.

What is workforce governance?

Workforce governance is the institutional architecture through which population need is translated into required work, workforce capability, safe practice and accessible services.

It includes the systems that educate and credential workers, make them visible, assure practice, create jobs and careers, fund access to their work and decide who has authority within the system.

Workforce planning asks how many workers we need. Workforce governance asks whether the system can see, support and mobilise the people capable of doing the work.

See the architecture in practice

Nine Structural Challenges in Health Workforce Planning

They are not separate problems. Each challenge shapes the next. The health workforce is the largest single cost in health care, and the pressure on it is not easing. Populations

We Moved Care Out of Hospital but Still Plan Around the Hospital Bed

Care has moved beyond hospitals, but workforce governance has not followed. The workers who prevent deterioration, support people at home and enable safe discharge are often those government can see,

When a smelter goes idle

Governments spend billions preserving industrial capacity when smelters become unviable. But when government redesigns the NDIS market it created, thousands of small, feminised allied health businesses are expected to absorb

EXPLORE THE THINKING

Framework. Method. Application.

Workforce Governance
A framework for understanding how institutions constitute, see, assure, value, fund and mobilise the workforce.
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PEASI™
A practical method for sorting through complex problems, identifying where leverage for change sits, and building a workable pathway from problem to impact.
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Applied Work
Research, advice, tools and learning for organisations trying to change workforce and health systems.
The Practice Studio →

The Practice Studio

A place to work with the ideas.

The Practice Studio is where I turn ideas, frameworks and methods into practical tools and learning experiences.
I’m reopening it gradually, starting with resources that are already useful and adding more as the work develops — and as I learn what people need.
I’m starting by making the Global Advanced Practice Summit freely available: a collection of ideas, examples and conversations about how advanced practice is evolving around the world.

Need help with a complex workforce problem?

I work with organisations to diagnose what is holding change in place, redesign workforce and governance arrangements, and build practical pathways for implementation.

Work with me →