Paper
Wednesday, 19 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Developing and Testing Instruments and Scales
Simulation Modeling as an Improvement to Traditional Health Human Resource Planning Techniques
Gail Tomblin Murphy, RN, PhD, School of Nursing, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada, George Kephart, PhD, Community Health & Epidemiology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada, Adrian MacKenzie, BSc(H), Population Health Research Unit, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada, Stephen Birch, PhD, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada, and Linda L. O'Brien-Pallas, RN, PhD, FCAHS, Faculty of Nursing, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Learning Objective #1: Have a sense of some key potential areas for improvement in existing approaches to HHR planning.
Learning Objective #2: Understand how comprehensive tools such as the simulation model we present can assist in developing efficient, effective planning for Health Human Resources.

With health human resource (HHR) planning beginning to receive more attention from policy makers, it seems that now may be the time to move beyond the traditional approaches taken to it. Though well-intended, established planning methods have tended to be overly simplistic and narrow in focus; ignoring, for example, the often significant effects of changing health needs of the population and the productivity of the workforce providing care for those needs on the system. Reliance on such planning practices has sometimes resulted in short-sighted HHR policies that have had serious negative consequences for the health care system and the people who depend on it. At a time when health care systems can ill afford the burdens of uninformed health care planning policies, it is becoming more and more essential that policy makers begin to look beyond conventional methods of HHR planning. In this session, we will highlight the potential for improvement on such methods, discuss the benefits of more comprehensive techniques, and, finally, demonstrate a general HHR planning simulation model we have developed that represents an important step forward in the illustration of key HHR planning concepts, and could be used to better inform future HHR policies.

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See more of The 17th International Nursing Research Congress Focusing on Evidence-Based Practice (19-22 July 2006)