Assessment Analytical Report.
Length: 2500 words. (NOTE: Executive Summary, References and Appendices are not included in the word count and excess words will not be marked).
Rationale
This report involves a review of relevant Australia health workforce reform and innovation projects. This is a typical real workplace activity and the topics of choice are highly relevant and current.
Task
Bohmer and Imison, (2013, p. 2025) have reviewed the UK National Health Service (NHS) workforce redesign initiatives since 2000 that “increased the number of doctors and nurses serving patients, expanded existing staff roles and developed new ones, redistributed health care work, and invested in teamwork”. One of their key findings is:
“The ways in which future teams work together may be more important than how the role of any one type of professional is designed. Understanding how to create structures that support loosely aligned and distributed teams and helping providers develop the skills needed to operate in such teams may turn out to be at least as important as, if not more important than-redistributing current tasks among old and new professional roles” (Bohmer and Imison 2013, p. 2029).
Health Workforce Australia (HWA) established an agenda of reform between 2011 and 2014 which included a range of innovations across different workforce categories and service areas. The results have been published in a range of reports in their publications list.
Choose one of the following topics relating to the HWA program:
Aged care : chosen topic AGE CARE REFORM PROGRAM UNDER HEALTH WORKFORCE AUSTRALIA
Provide a rationale for your choice of topic
Provide an overview of the program of innovation and reform for that topic in Australia, identify key objectives, the level of implementation and scope of the projects undertaken to date.
Identify if any evaluation studies have been completed on that topic and report on key findings.
Determine the key criteria for success identified in the literature on your chosen topic, and whether the following criteria have been achieved:
Improved teamwork (based on the study quoted above).
Generation of benefits for patients, their families and carers.
Strengthening of the capacity of the workforce.
Delivery of economic value to the health system.
Document barriers to achieving successful outcomes.
Recommend three key strategies to continue the program of reform and innovation in the Australian context and provide a rationale to justify these strategies.
Criteria
You will be assessed according to the following criteria:
Academic writing skills, use of report format and APA.
Ability to introduce the topic and findings in a well summarised Executive Summary.
Understanding of the process of workforce innovation and reform and its application to your topic.
Critical analysis of the level of evaluation undertaken to date and key findings.
Use of charts and or tables to support argument.
Critical analysis and synthesis of the relevant literature to support of argument.
Review of evaluation criteria, barriers to successful outcomes achieved.
Critical analysis of relevant literature in support of the topic to be addressed.
Ability to make recommendations to continue the process of reform and innovation with supporting rationale.
Resources
Provide your answers based on the unit material and recommended readings in Modules 3 to 5. Graphic material is an essential way of presenting health workforce data.
