Read the Report: The Complexities of National Health Care Workforce Planning

The health professional workforce is at the heart of the health care delivery system. All local and national efforts to transform this system require parallel commitment, coordination, and leadership from our health professionals. In this transformative time, it is critical that providers are ready and able to play new roles and acquire new skills to effectively deliver health care in the future.

Health Professional Workforce Initiative Expert Advisory Panel

Federal and state level health care reforms and initiatives require the development and adoption of innovative and creative approaches to clinical care. Recognizing the need to address changing demands on the health professions, the Health Professional Workforce Initiative (HPWI) will tackle the challenging issues around how to best structure, educate, retain, license, and regulate a health care workforce able to deliver patient-centered, team-based, high quality care.

The HPWI recognizes there are significant regional differences in the health care workforce and in the delivery of care. There are numerous efforts being tested and applied nationwide to address these issues. To this end, the HPWI will convene a series of informational meetings with key consumer, provider, insurer, and academic stakeholders, both nationally and in targeted states. The HPWI will investigate and analyze local and regional workforce experiences and initiatives through a combination of listening tours, site visits and stakeholder meetings and use findings to develop concrete and sensible recommendations.

GOALS FOR THE INITIATIVE

1. Identify and analyze challenging workforce issues around how to structure, educate, retain, license, finance, and regulate a health care workforce able to deliver patient-centered, team-based, high quality care.

2. Highlight creative and innovative workforce practices in the public and private sector and produce a set of policy options and issue briefs that convey interdisciplinary needs and challenges. Findings will be communicated at the federal, state, and local levels.

• Workforce Landscape: The Initiative will explore the projected supply and demand of health care services and professionals. It will make recommendations for aligning available resources with changing health care demands.
• Incentives and Innovation: The Initiative will explore financing, reimbursement, and innovative models of coordination that are interdisciplinary and aimed at improving health at the patient and population level.
• Lifelong Learning for a Workforce of the Future: The Initiative will analyze the entire spectrum of learning opportunities for health care providers of all types with an emphasis on best practices, curricular innovation, maintenance of licensure requirements and other regulatory issues that may vary by state.
• Additional Topics: Given the interdisciplinary nature of the health care delivery system, this Initiative will often intersect with other Health Project Initiatives. Possibilities for collaboration include health information technology, rural health care, health insurance reform and the Indian Health Service.