A workforce with the right capabilities, capacity and experience is key to the delivery of high-quality, safe and person-centred cancer care. Planning for the future cancer care workforce requires a data-informed understanding of current and future workforce gaps. Limited national workforce data availability is a longstanding barrier to fully understanding the distribution of capacity and capability of the healthcare workforce as a basis for workforce planning.
The current healthcare workforce is under significant pressure, with challenges resulting from COVID-19 pandemic burnout, workforce maldistribution, increasing medical specialisation and changing capability requirements as new technologies and models of care emerge. These challenges are well-documented across national health plans and state-based cancer plans.
Implementation of this 2-year action hinges on robust data-driven cancer workforce modelling. This includes:
Improved data-driven insights will support coordinated national cancer workforce planning. Developing an effective workforce pipeline will require collaboration with the sector across jurisdictions, peak body organisations, health services, research, education, and training bodies. Planning should also aim to address comprehensive cancer workforce needs, including education, training, wellbeing and support initiatives, and recruitment and retention strategies for all relevant roles involved in cancer care.
Known and projected gaps in workforce capability and capacity will be a planning priority, for instance clinical specialists, rural and remote cancer care specialists, cancer researchers, interpreters, survivorship roles and genomic testing specialists.
Coordinated national workforce planning should align with other relevant strategies currently in place, including the National Medical Workforce Strategy 2021–2031,[156] the Stronger Rural Health Strategy,[157] the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Workforce Strategic Framework and Implementation Plan 2021–2031[133] and State and Territory health workforce plans and jurisdictional cancer plans. A rigorous understanding of gaps in workforce capability and capacity will inform all other actions under Strategic Objective 5. While this action focuses on gaps, it is also important to consider barriers and enablers to building cancer workforce capacity and capability.
Building capacity and capability of the cancer workforce should also consider priority populations and where priority population groups are currently underrepresented in workforce diversity. Importantly, workforce modelling will be affected by gaps in the availability of data on many priority population groups.