Health Informatics Workforce study
HCA has recently commenced an important relationship with Australia’s premier health workforce infrastructure, the COAG initiated and multi-government funded Health Workforce Australia (HWA). After undertaking an initial scoping study into the Health Informatics workforce (download the previous Discussion Paper report) for HWA, the challenge now is to undertake a full scale study of this emerging yet extremely important workforce. Health informatics, and by implication the health informatics workforce, is at the centre of much of the planned innovation in the Australian health system (including most of the e-health initiatives) and will underpin Commonwealth Government hopes to drive and observe / monitor its major Health Reform Agenda.
Being a relatively new workforce, health informatics has ill-defined and somewhat permeable both internal and external boundaries. HCA will therefore approach this study with an innovative methodology, at the heart of which are several large ‘area’ or ‘region’ based case studies, in which both qualitative and quantitative data will be collected. The quantitative data will be through surveys administered to identified practitioners, who will be recruited to the survey population using a ‘snowball’ technique.
The project will run until March 2012 when a final report is due. The health informatics profession is keenly interested in this project and will no doubt provide great support. HWA is equally keen, and has a particular interest in using the processes of this project to build its methodology knowledge.
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