Development of a Health Workeforce Monitoring System in Greece

Background: Recent Greek economic crisis has had a mayor impact on healthcare system. A complete absence of planning human resources leeds to a need for healthcare workforce management tools, among them a re-distribution at a national and regional level following international indicators. Objectives: Aim of the study was to collect data on the current and future demand for and supply of human resources in the Greek health system, to map these data and finally to propose a model for future projections or actions. Methods: Data collected from various sources mainly of Ministry of Education for the supply and Ministry of Health for the demand. These data were aggregated in order tables to be standardized for future standard collection by these Ministries and the National Statistical Authority. The proposed model constitutes a combination between a stock-and-flow model and a workforce-to-population ratio approach. Results: Greece insists to an obvious oversupply of health professionals (over 7.000 annually), while demand can not absorb over 20-25% of these staff. Due to economic crisis, there is an urgent need for reinforcing especially public sector in terms of new hires mainly of nursing and midwifery staff, and re-distribution of all. Conclusions: The main results indicate that health policy makers could reach an optimal matching between future supply of and demand for healthcare workforce by adjusting the flexible supply components. This presupposes an accurate and stable system of data collection. On the demand side, it is also important to collect demographics and other related data that are more indicative of health needs