The EU Joint Action on Health Workforce Planning and Forecasting Publishes ‘User Guidelines on Qualitative Methods in Health Workforce Planning and Forecasting’

The user guidelines have been produced by the Centre for Workforce Intelligence (CfWI) with support of a broad network of international representatives, as part of the Joint Action.

They are aimed broadly at health workforce planners and forecasters in Member States (MSs) and stakeholder organisations in the European Union who would like to apply qualitative methods to improve their health workforce planning and forecasting in their specific national contexts.

The document describes the qualitative methods used by partners in Work Package 6 in the Joint Action on Health Workforce Planning and Forecasting. Qualitative methods are those which are used to gather and process information on the key factors which are likely to affect the supply and demand of health workforces (through techniques such as interviews) and includes methods to describe and quantify potential futures. 

These methods were identified from survey responses from WP6 partners and these guidelines contain information on the operational use of individual methods and also descriptions of the contexts in which they are used; individual descriptions of health workforce planning and forecasting for seven WP6 partners (Belgium, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom).

The identified qualitative methods are presented with examples and tools where available to make their accessibility and ease of use as straightforward as possible. The work describes the use and rationale for conducting:

• stakeholder identification and analysis
• literature reviews
• interviews
• surveys
• scenarios
• Delphi exercises

The document is available in the RESULTS section under D061, and also on www.horizonscanning.org.uk