Building on national and international evidence, the overall goal of the Department of Health’s workforce planning work programme is to produce evidence-based rolling health and social care workforce planning action plans. Targeted health and social care workforce policy measures are needed to ensure that health services will have the appropriate workforce supply to meet the health and social care demand of our future population. It’s also about how we train and prepare the current and future workforce and aligning education and training with the needs of the population.
Work is underway to expand the professional coverage of the workforce models to include a wider range of Health and Social Care Professionals regulated by CORU. This includes updating and developing models to incorporate more recent granular data from CORU and identifying parameters requiring further investigation and developing preliminary results. Initially, this will include dieticians, radiographers, radiation therapists, speech and language therapists, medical scientists, podiatrists and physiotherapists. Social Care Workers, also a registered profession with CORU, will be included when they have been regulated long enough for sufficient data to be available for incorporation into the planning projection models.
The Department of Health is planning to establish a Health and Social Care Workforce Planning Technical Group to oversee and coordinate data gathering and other workforce planning model inputs, facilitate collaboration and coordination between the different sectoral groups, and provide visibility of planning outputs across the health and social care system. To maximise the value of the group, it is intended that this group will be formalised when the workforce projection model update is complete. The Department continues to engage with professional regulators and other bodies involved in providing data inputs to the model to improve data quality, align data requests to the model and coordinate future data collection.
Progress has been made in recent years to address data gaps. For example, in 2024, the Department of Health completed an EU Technical Support Instrument project. This project "Health and Social Care Workforce Planning in Ireland" aimed to support the Department of Health in strengthening health workforce planning in Ireland, through building technical capacity and providing the necessary tools and procedures, including a health workforce model. This project acted as a catalyst to improve data collection to support workforce planning activities. In recent years, professional regulators have also been improving their ICT systems enabling them to provide data required for workforce modelling.
