Australia’s health workforce is a highly regulated, highly skilled and high-cost national resource, which is the single largest segment (15%) of the nation’s labour force, and the major asset and resource base underpinning the nation’s healthcare system, accounting for over 10% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It is the principal resource input to our nation’s health and community care system and the key enabler of its most advanced and substantial research capability.

Over the past decades, Australia has experienced long-term, entrenched imbalances between the supply and demand of its health and care workforce. There are also significant distribution challenges across rural, remote and metropolitan settings; industry segments (i.e., hospital, primary care, aged and disability care); and specialties such as general practice psychiatry, internal medicine, women’s health, and geriatrics. Typically, shortfalls in supply have been met by skilled migration, both temporary and permanent, to fill the gaps in overall industry workforce requirements and distribution. Co-ordination of policy and planning approaches for the nation’s health and care workforce continues to be both a major challenge and great opportunity.

Public policy responses have yet to be fully effective and are complicated by a complex mix of Commonwealth, State and Territory jurisdictional accountabilities; poorly organised and deficient data, intelligence and planning systems; and an insufficient evidence base to inform public policy, program design and evaluation.

Drawing together and applying research, data, planning and intelligence insights should form the foundation of evidence-based policy, planning and investment decisions about this high value resource.

The newly established National Centre for Health Workforce Studies (NCHWS) at ANU has embarked on a national research, education and policy leadership program to support government policymakers, industry, professions, regulators and the higher education sector to address current and future workforce priorities. The newly established NCHWS seeks to be a major academic centre for the study of Australia’s health and care workforce.

"Between 2009 and 2019 demand for GP services increased by 4.7 per cent annually (a total growth of 58 per cent) which is equivalent to the workload of 10,200 full time GPs. In the past five years, 2016–2021 the workforce added an equivalent of only 4,200 full time GPs.”

_{Source: Australian Medical Association, The General Practitioner workforce: Why the Neglect Must End. 2022.}

ANU has a strong comparative advantage and discipline base to establish the NCHWS through existing affiliations:

• Advanced epidemiology, population health, health economics and evaluation
  • National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health (NCEPH)
• Data access and modelling capacity
  • Health Data Analytics Team (HDAT)
  • National Centre for Geographic Resources & Analysis in Primary Health Care (GRAPHC)
• Public policy, administration, and labour economics
  • Crawford School of Public Policy
• Indigenous health workforce research   
  • National Centre for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing Research 
  • National Centre for Indigenous Genomics