Ensuring Tomorrow's Health:

Workforce Planning and Mobility

Brussels, Husa President Park Hotel

December 7 – 9, 2011

The conference is held under the auspices of the Polish EU Presidency and the Polish Minister of Health.

The timely delivery of safe and high quality health services relies to a large extend on the availability of doctors, nurses, dentists, pharmacists and the allied health professions. Having the right numbers of health professionals with the right skills in the right place is essential for the performance of health systems.

Efforts to develop the health workforce, however, are confronted with looming and manifest workforce shortages in Europe and elsewhere. There are also local, national and global imbalances in workforce supply and distribution. An increasing European mobility and global migration of health professionals further contributes to the uncertainties policy makers and workforce planners are facing when developing and retaining the health workforce.

The 63. World Health Assembly, 2010, adopted a Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel to serve as a continuous and dynamic framework for global dialogue and cooperation. In order to strengthen European health systems, the European Union together with the member states is developing joint activities. In addition, various local or organizational initiatives aim at improving the workforce situation.

Against this backdrop this conference aims at reviewing good practices and solutions addressing the challenge of developing and retaining an adequate health workforce. The conference will focus on workforce planning and mobility. Experiences and evidence form Europe and beyond will be included and reviewed. The conference focusses on four key aspects:

• New, innovative methods of workforce planning
• Data and intelligence systems
• General workforce strategies for a sustained health workforce
• International frameworks and mechanisms to manage mobility and migration

To facilitate debate and exchange between scientists, workforce planners, competent authorities and policy makers we have chosen a conference format that will foster discussions. Scientific input is provided by three EC funded research projects MohProf, RN4CAST and PROMeTHEUS.

The event is organized by the International Organization for Migration, the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies, and the Centre for Health Services & Nursing Research, Catholic University Leuven.