Let’s face health workforce challenges together!

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.

The Project
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Paolo Michelutti

Project manager | agenas| italy

“HEROES is the joint action that is strengthening EU Member States capacity to better organise and plan their health workforce to meet future health system challenges. All 19 countries involved in the action are working to create a more resilient and flexible health workforce. At the end of the action, they would be able to rely on solid databases, appropriate forecasting models, effective stakeholder involvement and a skilled staff of “health workforce planners”. The results of the participating countries will help all EU Member States to improve their capacity by creating a European community of experts and practitioners.“

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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.”

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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.” 

Despite the development of technology, digitalisation, medical devices, pharmaceutical research and innovation, the foundation of an effective and resilient health system, is the health workforce.

News

HEROES kicked off

HEROES kicked-off in Rome on the 15 February 2023.

In the coming 3 years we will build and improve health workforce planning governance, data, planning models, skills and stakeholder involvement.

The aim is to implement progressive and sustainable changes in the 19 European countries involved, building on key lessons from previous initiatives.

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Health system needs

In HEROES we believe that complex systems such as health systems, characterised by emergencies and a rapid evolving population needs, require advanced planning systems that can support countries to manage:

  • the balance between the current supply of health workforce, the health workforce demand and the needs of the population;
  • the balance between training capacity, future supply and future estimated demand of the health workforce;
  • the balance between specialised and high-level skills and sustainability and flexibility of the health workforce. [more]

Countries need to equip themselves with systems, models, tools, data and information that enable policy makers to make long term decisions about training, recruitment and retention of the health workforce in health facilities at different levels, taking into account the changing demand of the population, the models for organising the health services to meet those demand and the possibility that such systems may be exposed to health shocks and crises.

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