This may indicate a common theme around role substitution, and reflects the broader challenges of workforce development within the NHS.
The challenges of our workforce, poverty, education, security..
Levels of qualifications and training for practitioners vary enormously across states, dramatic wage gaps exist between community- and school-based early childhood programs, and the desire to help children and families too often obscures the herculean challenges of a workforce for whom wages are chronically low and benefits are limited, if non-existent.
This study remains the first effort to assess gaps in the availability and distribution of human resources for CEmONC provision in Afghanistan, and illustrates availability, distribution, and motivational challenges of health workforce scale-up in a setting where conflict destroyed much of the country's health and health education infrastructure.
I have found Tamara Erickson's Challenge of the Changing Workforce very interesting, especially as it relates to projected skill shortages in the workforce and generational differences between traditionalists, boomers, Gen-X and Gen-Y.
Healthcare organisations in the UK are responding positively to the challenge of reconfiguring the workforce to meet local needs.
Moreover, it suggests that a preventive intervention to overcome the challenge of an ageing workforce should be able to deal with individually experienced problems and needs.
In the Australian context, the complexity of addressing these challenges to workforce sustainability is magnified by factors such as: a legacy of a bifurcated education/care system; multiple government funding pathways; and diverse service ownership structures and regulatory jurisdictions associated with Australia's federated political system (Productivity Commission 2011).
"Physician associate represent a new cadre of staff with the potential to address a number of workforce challenges," it says.
As this brief overview of workforce challenges suggests, there is much at stake in the development of effective strategies for supporting workforce sustainability.
