Leading Country: Belgium
Organisation: FPS Federal Public Service Health, Food chain Safety and Environment in Belgium
This WP executes the daily management of the JA and provides overall planning, facilitates collaboration and follows up actions to maximize the generation of outcomes and the successful delivery of coherent project outputs. Tasks include the design and implementation of a project structure, underlying processes and good practices for managing projects, such as: quality management and control to ensure that quality criteria are met; procedures to manage risks and issues that are raised; development of templates and tools; change control to register and manage changes or new requests that may arise; reporting to the European Commission (Interim and Final Reports).
Another aspect of this work package is to identify and record major risks within the project, in order to take the appropriate actions to avoid/mitigate the risk and minimise its impact should it materialise. WP1 also organises meetings with the Executive board, which is the governing body of the Joint Action. It helps the members keep an overall view on the progress of key project milestones, ensuring that an effective decision making process can occur. Regular progress reports and meetings (online and face-to-face) enable WP1 to link the activities of the other WPs together, updating the overall work plan and following up on decisions/strategies that have been implemented within the WPs.
WP1 coordinates, facilitates and supports the working processes across all work packages involved in the Joint Action. Furthermore, WP1 coordinates the consistency and scientific validity of the Joint Action outputs. The members of the team, along with other partners, represent the Joint Action in external meetings and events and act as ambassadors of the Joint Action and its outcomes.
Furthermore, WP1 organizes the Plenary Assembly on a yearly basis. The main goal of the Plenary Assembly is to inform the associated and collaborating partners on the overall progress of the Joint Action and present the future activities of the Joint Action.
Leading Country: Slovakia and European Health Management Association (acting as the co-leader of the work package)
Organisation: Ministry of Health Slovakia,
European Health Management Association
This WP facilitates coherent, effective and sustainable external communication of the JA. It will ensure that the JA aims, objectives, results and final products are disseminated to all identified stakeholders and a wider audience at EU and national/regional levels. It applies methodologies to ensure the transferability of the JA’s results and optimize relations between stakeholders.
The dissemination WP aims to engage stakeholders in order to increase the impact of the JA through a series of Joint Action conferences (with full support of the coordinator), as well as through the network of in-country knowledge brokers (KBs). The network consists of one KB per Member State and one per professional organisation. Knowledge Brokers are actively involved in the joint activities and their role is to disseminate and promote JA outputs and results at country level.
WP2 is fully responsible for the project newsletter that is issued on a quarterly basis in addition to all external communication and Joint Action promotion.
At the start of the JA, WP2 performed a stakeholder analysis to identify the target audience of the Joint Action. The stakeholder analysis provided a solid platform for identification of the stakeholder’s interest, exchanging knowledge on preferred ways of interaction and finding the effective dissemination channels for each group of stakeholders. The stakeholder analysis, being a living document, is regularly updated based on the Joint Action timeline.
All dissemination activities are summed up in the Dissemination Plan that incorporates all aspects of dissemination activities starting with Dissemination Strategy. The plan provides an overall perspective for successful dissemination, identification, and mitigation of the risks and issues.
Leading Country: Finland and Malta
Organisation: Ministry of Social Affairs and Health, Finland,
University of Eastern Finland,
Ministry for Health, the Elderly and Community Care, Malta
The main task of Work Package 3 (WP3) – Evaluation, is to verify whether the Joint Action (JA) is being implemented as planned and reaches the defined objectives.
WP3 provides a systematic approach for the internal evaluation of the JA through:
The main tools used by WP3 for evaluation include: tailor-made Structured Evaluation Checklists, Expert Reference Groups and Focus Groups. The reports emanating from these evaluations are forwarded to the Work Package Leaders and Project Management for their perusal at agreed timescales and are then discussed and approved during the JA Executive Committee meetings held on regular basis.
Apart from the continuous feedback and evaluation, WP3 was commissioned to produce an Evaluation strategy, Expert Reference Groups reports, Interim Evaluation report and Final Evaluation report.
Along the course of the JA, the role of WP3 has evolved into a developmental evaluation in view of the continuous feedback given to the Work Packages. WP3 team strives to reach successfully the targets set through self-evaluation, professionalism and commitment.
Leading Country: Hungary
Organisation: Semmelweis University
WP4 provides key building blocks for health workforce planning and forecasting systems by providing better understanding of available data on member states (MS) and EU level, and on that basis, providing policy recommendations to improve data collection in the MSs of the EU, with special focus on mobility.
This work package aims at improving the quality and comparability of health workforce data that is collected and supplied by MSs to international data collecting organizations. The produced data contents are compared to the definitions and guidelines of international data collecting organisations, primarily in relation to the “Joint Questionnaire on no-monetary data” of Eurostat, OECD and WHO.
Particular focus is put on international mobility data which is specifically important for health workforce planning in most EU countries. As an expansion of activities related to mobility, efforts are made to initiate a discussion on the applicability of the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel within a European context, including the mapping of best practices.
The collection of health workforce planning data helps to better analyse the available data from the health workforce planning perspective within the MSs participating in the work package. Through discussions, the WP provides a gap analysis for MSs participating in the activity, presents good practices, and formulates guidelines on how to overcome these gaps.
In all, WP4 aims to create a dynamic willingness amongst MSs to collect data required for comprehensive HWF planning. This results in sustainable access to timely health workforce planning data on national and international levels.
Leading Country: Italy
Organisation: Ministry of Health, Italy,
AGENAS
WP5 develops and promotes opportunities, conditions and tools within member states (MSs) to facilitate the sharing of experience with other countries. This enables countries to develop more sophisticated and effective workforce planning structures and models to forecast the needs and shortages of “regulated” health professions: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dentists and midwives. WP5 started with a survey of existing literature (handbook, research projects, guidelines, academic papers, survey, reports and country profiles of feasibility study etc.) in order to outline a baseline for the state of play on the matter. WP5 has produced an analysis and description of the good practices existing in European Countries, with a special focus on quantitative models.
Characteristics and crucial parameters of existing planning methodologies in different countries have been analysed and described using methods such as questionnaires, interviews and workshops, involving stakeholders, authorities and experts of each participating member state (the knowledge brokers).
Results and findings will be shared on a web based platform and in a Handbook on HWF Planning Methodologies across EU Countries. A minimum dataset reporting crucial parameters in models will be presented. WP5 has developed a proposal on how to build or improve upon more effective planning methodologies. In order to test this, the proposal is being implemented in two pilot projects conducted in Italy and Portugal, with two feasibility studies, one in Germany and the other in Romania together with Moldova.
The knowledge, experience and outcomes of WP5 will be reflected in the Final Health Workforce Guide.
Leading Country: United Kingdom
Organisation: Centre for Workforce Intelligence
Horizon scanning in health workforce planning and forecasting is used to explore and describe the factors and forces driving change in workforce systems. Horizon scanning is one of the qualitative methodologies available to health workforce planners, allowing them to consider the future in a systematic way.
WP6 gathers examples of the qualitative methods used by Member States across the EU to produce guidelines aimed at those who would like to apply qualitative methods to improve their health workforce planning and forecasting in their specific national contexts. These qualitative methods may be used either on their own or in combination with quantitative methods.
The primary concern of Work Package 6 is focused on horizon scanning for the future skills and competences of the health workforce in Europe. This part of horizon scanning uses a skills and competence approach to describe the drivers of change and use this description to consider what may need to be done by health workforces in the future in response to these drivers, whether that is in the development of new types of workforce planning research, new types of skills or in enhancing existing skills in response to developments in knowledge or treatments.
Work Package 6 also contributes to other work within the Joint Action partner network. The work package cooperates with the Belgian Ministry of Health as they carry out a pilot study to apply horizon scanning and Delphi methods to their workforce planning processes. The final aspect of the Work Package is the contribution to the final European Health Workforce Planning and Forecasting Guide where the experience, outputs and knowledge of work package 6 will be reflected.
Leading Country: Bulgaria and Belgium (as a co-leading country)
Organisation: Medical University of Varna, Bulgaria
Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium
The main goal of Work Package 7 within the project is to consolidate the experience of the Joint Action on Health Workforce Planning and Forecasting in order to increase the impact of health workforce planning and forecasting on policy decision making. Through a review of the projects’ objectives and results and in close collaboration with the partners, the needs, tasks and possible formats will be defined to continue the activities after the Joint Action period in 2016.
WP 7 consolidates the experiences from the Joint Action into the design for a platform of collaboration and exchange between member states (MSs), stakeholders, international organizations and the academia. As a prior objective, this platform will enable future uptake and roll out of tools and methodology for health workforce planning, according to the recommendations within the European Member States.
Building on the JA’s own research and the output from the core deliverables, WP7 produces a number of very important documents. The theoretical base for the sustainability activities is included in the Sustainability plan. Sustainability plan is built on the basis of The Knoster model (it connects the symptom with the components of change). The main roles of the stakeholders’ group, the policy dialogues, the educational plans for transferring the knowledge and skills and the indicators for monitoring the implementation are considered in the sustainability plan.
The technical recommendations, elaborated by Work package 7 and endorsed by other work packages, provide Member States and stakeholders with a framework of operational actions to take in order to build both a planning capacity and a dialogue.
On the other hand, policy recommendations provide Member States and stakeholders with a framework of strategic directions on which further national and international policy dialogue is needed to address the challenges of HWF planning in a framework of inequities within a single market.
Work package 7 manages and is responsible for the broader network of experts that will act as a sustainability driver once the project is finished. The Network of Experts involves experts with different levels of competences identified in the documents of the Joint Action. The list has been drawn from well-known experts in the field, participants in meetings and events organized within the Joint Action on Health workforce planning and Forecasting as well as representatives of stakeholders and partners. In addition to those opinions, as an added value of the networking, the opinion of the future generations of health professionals has been studied too. This has been achieved through a survey among students in medicine, dental medicine, pharmacy and nursing in European universities in collaboration with the European Students Council.
The Joint Action on European Health Workforce Planning and Forecasting has received
funding from the European Union in the framework of the Public Health Programme.
Joint Action Management Team: euhwforce@health.belgium.be
Responsible:
Eng. MSc. Michel Van Hoegaerden on behalf
of the belgian FPS Public Health, Food Chain Safety & Environment