Empowering the NZ Health Workforce eBook

15 Jun, 2023

We were excited to attend this year's HINZ Digital Leadership Summit in Wellington at the end of May, as we had attended previously, and we know the value that can be gained from the round table discussions with people who have deep experience in data and in digital health.

The importance of community, trust and workforce seemed to be gaining increasing recognition at the table discussions this year. The eBook we produced as an outcome of previous table discussions explores using technology to empower the health workforce. It is a selection of insights, challenges and future thinking that originated from the sector that we wanted to share back to ensure the value of the discussions wasn’t wasted.

Introduction

Over the period of a week in March 2021 the AMS Workforce Management team had conversations with just over 150 health sector workers and influencers as part of the HiNZ Digital Health Leadership Summits. We took a lot of accurate notes (not recordings) from the discussions’ which have formed the basis for this overview.

Our topic was: How can new technologies, including AI, change the way our people systems work to give us the workforce we need to transform our health systems?

While people management (rostering, timesheets, payroll, training, core HR) is often positioned as a “back office” activity - in the health sector, it sits right on the frontline. Particularly when it comes to the kind of transition New Zealand is looking to make over the next few years. We need workers with the right skills in the right places to make any digital transformation happen.

Health NZ hadn’t been announced at the time of these discussions, yet there was a strong view of the need for a more national approach to how the health workforce is managed, tracked, engaged with and compensated.

This led to some strong themes that form the basis for this paper:

how people-based data and records are managed, which leads to
how health sector workers are trained, which then takes us to
getting the right skills in the right place at the right time, which finally takes us to
how we are going to make this transition happen

Along the way, we got some interesting “What If?” future thinking ideas plus great quotes from those who took part – better that you hear it in their words, not ours.

So please join us on this journey. We have taken on board what has been said and are looking at how we can build out our AMS collaboration and co-design programme to bring more of these ideas to fruition.

Finally – a very big thank you to everyone who took part in these discussions. Your insight, knowledge sharing, and thoughtfulness will hopefully bring about the positive change we’re all looking for.

Joseph Yip, Chief Executive AMS

Follow this link to download the full eBook