HEROES Joint Action (HEalth woRkfOrce to meet health challEngeS), is dedicated to be a worthy successor of the JA Health Workforce and the SEPEN Joint Tender. These projects have achieved important results in the field of planning and forecasting of health workforce in the recent years.

Continuity is indicated in this website as HEROES JA took over healthworkforce.eu serving as a guiding platform of the health workforce field, where results of the previous projects remain also available.


News

WP5 Cluster Workshop in Porto

The city of Porto, in Portugal, hosted a meeting of European countries, organized by ACSS, which debated the best methodologies to respond to the problem of attractiveness and retention of human resources in Health in Europe for two days. This meeting is part of the HEROES PROJECT, which aims to reinforce and improve planning in the area of health and human resources, and took place on the 21st and 22nd of November. In this project, Portugal, through ACSS, assumes leadership of one of the groups of countries and has Norway as a co-leader.

The meeting, which took the form of a workshop involving countries such as Norway, Italy, Spain, Greece, Sweden and Portugal, aims to improve the planning capacity of health human resources in Europe, to ensure accessibility, sustainability and the resilience of health services and systems. Other countries, like Hungary, Netherlands, and Slovénia, also made an important contribution to the results of the workshop by promoting cooperation between the participants and countries.  

This meeting had the merit of leading countries to “share common challenges and identify opportunities for improvement and collaboration”. This meeting promoted the debate for the next developments in the HEROES Project, like the definition of action strategies such as the urgent improvement of human resources databases; the development of more effective planning tools and methods, as well as training professionals with more and better skills.

WP7 Cluster workshop in Utrecht

On November 15-16 2023, the HEROES WP7 Cluster Workshop was held in Utrecht! The workshop successfully onboarded the whole team into project activities, fostered dynamic learning exchanges among cluster countries, and gained a comprehensive overview of the task activities and each country’s current situation.

The event featured interactive country presentations, where participants actively engaged in discussions initiated by the moderator, and in-depth sessions on Tasks, exploring gaps and deficiencies in each context.  The highlight was a hands-on simulation of HWF forecasting using Nivel’s Excel modelling tool, customized to each country’s HWF data. The apex  of the workshop were Belgium’s HWF planning model, Nivel’s Excel HWF forecasting tool, Malta’s successful implementation of the forecasting tool, and Slovakia’s innovative methodology for forecasting healthcare services demand emerged as major interest attractors.  Excitingly, numerous bi- and tri-lateral meetings are already in the works for January 2024, as countries dive deeper into these attractors, fostering knowledge transfer and pushing the boundaries of collaborative healthcare innovation.

First WP6 Cluster meeting in Budapest

Budapest hosted the first cluster meeting and workshop of the HEROES (HEalth workforce to meet health challEngeS) joint action.  

Hungary participates in the WP6 cluster on Improving Health Work Force Planning Capacity along with Croatia, Romania, Slovenia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania where OKFŐ leads cluster activities as the Competent Authority.

The Health Services Management Training Centre (HSMTC) of the Semmelweis University participates in the Joint Action as an affiliated entity, fulfilling the role of Task Leader in data provision related activities. 


Lisa Baldini

programme and financial manager agenas| italy

HEROES is probably going to be the core of all European initiatives focusing on health workforce. HEROES is the Joint Action that aims to improve the capacity of EU Member States to better organise and plan their health workforce. The goal, that is being pursued by the 19 participating countries, is to have robust databases, appropriate planning methodologies, effective stakeholder involvement and to further improve skills of health workforce planners. The strength of this Joint Action lies in the exchange of good practices and experiences to produce results that can help all EU Member States to improve their expertise and capabilities, thus creating a European community of experts which has the potential to overcome the challenges on the issue of the health workforce planning.

Ronald Batenburg

professor | nivel| the netherlands

“This Joint Action creates the opportunity for countries to effectively learn from each other. Not only from good practices but also from countries that share the same healthcare system and health workforce challenges. This principle of ‘country learning clusters’ will improve the cross-fertilisation and country support, which needed more than ever to mitigate the extraordinary pressure on our health workforces today.”

Dora Toth

senior expert| okfő | Hungary

Optimizing the human workforce in health care is one of the biggest challenges today. I believe that the methodologies and health policies set up in the HEROES project and the knowledge transfer between Member States will help to bring about major system changes for a better healthcare environment with the joint effort in Europe.” 

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