Needs-based health human resources planning : Planification des ressources humaines de la santé fondée sur les besoins

The tools for focusing HHR planning on the levels and distributions of health in populations are available where decision-makers are prepared to accept the challenge of replacing traditional use (or capacity) based approaches to HHR planning with approaches that base planning explicitly on needs for care, independent of the current levels and configurations of the supply of health care. [...] The recurrent cycles of over- and undersupply of HHR that continue to plague Canada and other countries can be traced, in part, to the fact that while the stated goal of HHR planning is usually to match human resources to need for services, 3 Needs-Based Health Human Resources Planning: The Challenge of Linking Needs to Provider Requirements the theoretical models and empirical tools used to infor [...] This 9 Needs-Based Health Human Resources Planning: The Challenge of Linking Needs to Provider Requirements information was important to both health care managers and health human resources planners in their efforts to deploy efficient mixes of health care resources and identify future human resource requirements to support the efficient provision of health human resources. [...] Specifically, the five steps in their method were: 1. Determining the size and relevant characteristics (for example, age and sex) of the population in the service area; 2. Determining the level of need in the population by applying known mental illness prevalence rates to the population; 16 Needs-Based Health Human Resources Planning: The Challenge of Linking Needs to Provider Requirements 3. Det [...] In this way different levels of need are incorporated into the analysis independent of the demographic mix in the population thereby separating the aging of the population from the health of the population.