HEROES Policy Dialogues for successful Health Workforce Planning
The HEROES partnership is dedicated to design, develop and implement health workforce (HWF) planning in a systematic way. European Member States recognized the need for strategic planning because of the longstanding challenges we have faced in the last few decades. Managing the shortages or international mobility, fostering the attractiveness of health professions, establishing the right number of student intake in health sciences, retaining well-qualified health workers, optimizing performance and skill-mix, ensuring equality and safe working conditions, improving well-being and many more are all relevant and essential actions for more efficient HWF. These might sound simple and clear directions but include a series of meaningful actions.
How shall we approach these complex actions?
Clearly, HWF planning requires system thinking and the combination of technical alignment with policy interventions. We often discuss about the data, tools and models or skills of planners, but these are just one crucial side of the story. In order to run and maintain planning systems, plenty of stakeholders should get involved and work jointly for this mission. Policy dialogues are essential components of evidence-informed policy making and important tools in our hands to achieve more advanced planning goals and impact system development.
2025 is the year of HEROES Policy Dialogues!
The partnership is working hard on the preparations to carry out national level Policy Dialogues in 19 European Member States, as well as to organize EU level Policy Dialogues. The partners at national level identified the most pressing issues that require urgent solutions, and communication has started about the role of EU plans and formulating the best ways to proceed for more developed HWF in Europe.
What happened at national level so far?
Some HEROES countries initiated the stakeholder dialogues last year; therefore some sessions of policy dialogues were already organized in Czechia, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Malta and Sweden. As the dialogue means several meetings, and engaging stakeholders, HEROES partners are steering these dialogues and coordinating them in the national context. In Czechia, colleagues carried out an in-depth health labour market analysis that served as hard evidence for formulating specific goals for developing their planning system, which are establishing the comprehensive national HRH strategy and setting up the national centre for planning. In Greece, colleagues discussed the data optimalization action plan and agreed the ways to improve health workforce supply. In Italy, stakeholders gathered and received a detailed overview on the two existing planning models in the country. They identified professional groups particularly affected by imbalances or shortages, therefore emergency physicians, nurses, and neurologists were selected as priority areas for policy dialogues. In Lithuania, colleagues conducted a series of high-level political dialogues, which enabled high-level stakeholder engagement to improve cooperation between data management authorities, as well as to set up the national competence platform. In Malta, colleagues organized several sessions on the various steps for implementation of Health Workforce Strategy 2022 – 2030. In Sweden, colleagues dedicated attention to stakeholder involvement and built collaboration with various institutes at various levels. The focus of their dialogue evolves around building agreement on health workforce policies and creating a strategic roadmap to guide health workforce planning. All these examples show the high-level enthusiasm and dedication of HEROES partners towards health workforce planning development and their agile governance of national level stakeholder networks.
The step-by-step approach of the organisation of national level policy dialogues was adapted to each of the 19 countries matching their national needs. Other HEROES partners for example from Estonia, Croatia, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain are also busy organizing their first policy dialogues sessions these days, so we can say that the dialogue on health workforce planning and policies is expanding.
What is going to happen at EU level?
Doubtlessly, the different levels must work together to reach the sustainable health workforce in Europe, therefore the national and EU level plans should be aligned and strengthen each other’s voices. Our aim is to foster collaboration and enable sharing perspectives of various stakeholders in HWF relating issues. To do so, an EU level policy dialogue will be organized by the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies mid-September to discuss strategic directions of health workforce planning and forecasting for health system transition.
Stay tuned for further information and join in the HEROES Policy Dialogues.