Comparison Of Health Workforce Between Australia And New Zealand

Table of Contents

Health is a key aspect for any human being and any nations, this is seen even in its appearance as the third SDG goal “Good health and wellbeing”, Buddha the founder of Buddhism quoted health as the “life’s greatest blessing” (Gauld, 2012). The state of health as an important need cannot survive without the presence of the health workforce who ensure that the health sector is at its best and that health services are provided whenever required.

Australia as a country in the western pacific region and a member in the World Health organization has put up several measures and policies to ensure that they provide quality services to their citizens. The department of health in the country that is headed by Hon. Jill Hennesse MP not only sets standards and hospitals but also follow up to ensure that these standards are implemented amongst other services such as employment for the good of its citizens.

The world health organization is an agency or organization that functions under united nations with an aim of ensuring quality health internationally, it does this by-passing legislations, recommendations and medical support for its members (Grigg & Tracy, 2013).

In choosing the country to compare with Australia’s health sector, my choice was New Zealand. New Zealand and Australia are very close countries that have belonged to several unions together such as United Nations, World Trade Organization, New Zealand Australia Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and World Health Organization amongst others, the citizens of both country are free to work in any country amongst them without taxes or tariffs in fact,  in the year 2013 approximately 650, 000 citizens of New Zealand were staying in Australia (Perkins et al., 2015), this was about quarter of the total population in New Zealand.

New Zealand is a country found in the southwester part of the Pacific Ocean with about 600 Islands within it (Huntington et al., 2011), this Island country is headed by a queen closely followed by a prime minister who are advised by several other ministers, among the ministries is the health ministry that is currently headed by Dr. David Clark (Gauld, Horsburgh, & Brown, 2011).

This country though different in size share a lot of issues such as diversity and presence of islands amongst other issues such as sharing a British colonial heritage and belonging to settler communities (Williamson, & Harrison, 2010).

The health workforce in Australia and New Zealand is comprised of several medical professionals such as the doctors, nurses, volunteers and medical practitioners (Moore et al., 2015). They include the professionals who carry out activities such as physical treatment, mental treatment and those that carry out consultations in the psychological department.

Introduction and rationale for selection of countries

The largest number of health force is comprised of the nurses and midwives as compared to other professionals (Zimmet, Moylan, & Colagiuri, 2017), out of this population the largest gender is occupied by women with little percentage of men, according to statistics 54% of health workforce in New Zealand are women and they continue to produce more women from medical schools the same is seen in Australia this population is at 53% as compared to the men in the health workforce.

In both countries there has been significant improvement in the quality of medical practitioners leading to decrease in the mortality rate in both country because of diseases such as cancer, asthma, HIV and other cardiovascular diseases.

Most health professionals are in urban areas due to the large population in the urban centers (Pairman, Tracy, Thorogood, & Pincombe, 2010) and most hospitals are public hospitals which means that most of the health workers are found in the public hospitals.

According to common wealth statistics both countries medical practitioner was among the best in administrative efficiency (Schluter et al., 2011), administrative efficiency is concerned with the management of the hospital or any medical service provision organization.

In terms of health outcomes both countries have had good health outcomes in terms of looking at the performance of the workers, they have had better health outcomes that has surpassed that of the US though the UK is still ahead of the countries (McFarlane & Van, 2017).

Australia is among the top ten countries global that spend huge amount of money to fund their medical sector, though this is greater than that of New Zealand, in terms of percentage they both spend a large percentage of their tax in the medical department. Both countries health systems are funded by taxes up to 80% and then the rest is because of sponsorships and donations (Chrisopoulos, Harford, & Ellershaw, 2016).

The nurses and midwives that form the largest population in the medical category are found to be the ones that are receiving the least amount of salary ranging $50,000 to 70 000$ per year compared to the few general practitioners who receive salaries that range from $100 000 to $200 000 per year (Crowther et al., 2018).

These countries share a common reporting system (OECD. Publishing, 2013) and according statistics both countries have developed in the research process and promotion amongst the in the medical practitioner’s category however they do not share in the educational system or curriculum the largest difference being seen in the education of the dentist (Laurence & Karnon, 2016).

Environmental Scan of health workforce in both countries

Both countries contain laws or regulations and conduct document that dictate the behavior of medical practitioners and the laws sometime refer to each other, both government have tried their best to create the best working conditions to the doctors and the nurses.

The professional conduct in terms of behavior of the New Zealand health force has been doubtful with several scandals of wrong surgery (Kensington et al., 2018), smoking at work amongst and majorly corruption despite the large investment of the government to the health sector.

For nurses and midwives, according to statistics 9 out 10 employees in Australia are women. This is 90.3%,98% of the midwives were the women. Out of 100 000 people there are 57dentist comprising of 4 dental therapists and 5 dental hygienists.

The graph below provides the gender of the practitioners working in Australia categorized according to the area of work

The graph below shows the different categories of the medical practitioners in terms of whether they are clinical or not the same colors still applying in showing the gender.

Table in terms of the regions in Australia

Year	NSW	Vic	Qld	WA	SA	Tas	ACT	NT	Australia
2005	24,566	17,315	10,514	5,766	5,664	1,700	1,592	773	67,890
2006	25,116	18,625	10,821	7,196	5,800	1,592	1,614	977	71,740
2007)	24,810	19,509	13,928	8,247	6,113	1,846	1,720	1,020	77,193
2008	25,105	19,711	15,235	7,872	6,212	1,793	1,778	964	78,669
2009(a)	25,625	20,648	16,526	8,401	6,470	2,204	1,902	1,120	82,895
2011	27,723	21,148	16,865	8,456	6,804	2,021	1,718	1,010	87,790
2012(	28,104	21,320	17,070	8,726	6,771	1,972	1,748	1,061	88,254
2013	29,066	21,912	17,377	9,115	6,910	2,020	1,782	1,080	91,467
2014	29,902	22,824	18,072	9,376	7,073	2,083	1,802	1,146	94,617
2015	30,578	23,675	18,771	9,735	7,180	2,079	1,853	1,178	97,466

This graph represents the total population distribution of the practitioners out of 100 population of the citizens it is a graph of 2012 and 2015

In this graph the practitioners are classified as per their specialists and the largest population is found in the major cities.

The table for age

	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Aged <25	—	—	—	1.8	—
Aged 25–34	46.4	45.0	60.2	55.6	74.9
Aged 35–44	114.0	123.0	184.2	148.9	158.6
Aged 45–54	259.7	227.0	273.9	252.6	235.4
Aged 55+	296.8	328.7	364.8	424.3	395.5

Table for total number of practitioners 

Year	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
Registered practitioners	87,790	91,504	95,013	98,807	102,805
Other in the occupation	81,751	81,910	84,613	87,693	90,383
Total	78,960	79,653	82,498	85,510	88,040

Overall classification of workforce in Australia up to 2017

Category	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	Total
Clinician	26,682	20,719	16,927	8,543	6,417	1,802	1,559	1,039	83,731
Non-clinician	1,462	1,199	624	409	296	98	156	63	4,309
Administrator	446	372	250	176	98	33	84	30	1,490
Teacher/educator	370	231	172	115	75	39	35	19	1,056
Researcher	479	483	125	84	94	19	21	13	1,319
Other

In terms of overall number of practitioners

Practitioners
Category	Total
General practitioners	3541
Medical Officers	970
House officers	500
Special scale
Primary care	150
Registrars	1689
Specialists	3879
Others	275
Not reported	160
Total	11164

 In terms of gender

Year	2007			2008			2009
Ethnicity	non-M?ori	Total	M?ori	non-M?ori	Total	M?ori	non-M?ori	Total
Female	5925	6065	178	6306	6484	181	6621	6802
Male	3571	3692	150	3918	4068	149	4213	4362
Total	9496	9757	328	10224	10552	330	10834	11164

 Types of nurses

Registered	Total
Enrolled	41406
Nurse practitioner	2933
Nurse assistant	16
	205
	44560

Some of the health issues that need to be addressed in New Zealand are:

There is a problem providing health services to the areas that are found in the rural areas or areas that are located away from the city because a lot of the health workforce with are founding the city, also there are few technological machines in handling a lot of diseases in the indigenous areas since the medical practitioners with knowledge of operating this machine have move to the city.

The country is also facing problems with mobility of practitioners in that most of the practitioners do not settle in a single place for a long time for work, they keep on changing their working areas constantly making it difficult to be assigned to a place especially if they keep travelling to other countries.

Data profile of health workforce in both countries

There has been reduction in the number of practitioners who are attending to the old or aged people in both the rural and urban centers and the diseases from old age are not yet addressed. This need to be addressed in the workforce by assigning nurses to old people.

There has been constant climate change in the country which has affected both the practitioners and the people due to frequent illness for the past two years. Lastly another major issue in the country is that there has been surgical problems and emergence of new infections that have been a challenge to the medical practitioners due to inadequate technology, the government needs therefore to invest more in acquiring new technology that will enable this practitioner to accomplish this task.

The issues that are related to New Zealand that are to be addressed are:

There is ageing and population reduction of the medical practitioners (Thokala et al.,2016) , most of the qualified health workforce are the old and they are continuing to reduce due to their ageing others are becoming more ineffective yet they are retained in their workplace, on the other side few young people are taking up medicine curses as doctors, the young people therefore need to be encouraged to go for studying medicine as the old people age.

The issue of new technology emerging has been a challenge in Australia (Gilkison et al.,2017) since the technologies require experts to handle them and incase of failure they also need to be fixed yet the doctors are not aware of operating them, the doctors need to be taught how to use these new technologies in by holding regular training sections without interfering with the normal doctor practices.

There has also been lack of health workers to work in some areas or sectors that deal with diseases that are because of aging this disease include dementia, obesity, asthma, cardiovascular health and cancer diseases. There is therefore need for medical practitioners in this sector which means that more doctors and nurses need to be trained in this sector.

Another issue that has been affecting the workforce is the issue of outdated patient to doctor allocation, many scholars have argued that the method that is used in the allocation of the few available doctors is based on outdated population statistics that do not capture the increase in the population thus leading to overworking a single institution making the members in an area not to receive the services that they are supposed to be receiving, this can be changed reassigning of doctors based on the new statistics by the agency in charge of research in Australia.

Identification of critical issues in each country

The issues that are facing Australia that could be catastrophic to the future is the emergence of changing of the structure of diseases (Kelsey, 2015) that have required increased research thus limiting the growth of other sectors that require this profession, this just means that there is need for more workers.

It can be noted that there are issues that are affecting both countries that require to be addressed such as the method in dealing with technology, changes in disease improvement, need for more qualified doctors, imbalanced gender within profession and lastly reallocation of doctors or nurses about population to allow the medical services to reach all the citizens including those away from the city.

According to the recommendations that have been provided in the world health organization that is titled” Working for health and growth: investing in the health workforce” in the pages 11 and 12 the following it can be noted that:

In terms of job creation, in both countries there continue to be jobs in the health work force with majority being women, the only challenge is that there is need for more people to work in this sectors since there are some areas that have not been addressed yet.

In terms of gender it can be noted that the countries have practiced women rights but they have failed to carry out gender inequality in that they have not yet incorporated women into the lucrative areas in the profession (Bogossian et al., 2015) such as general practitioners leaving them as nurses.

There is no doubt that both countries are having very good educational systems, onyx that the changes in technology is affecting the workforce since technology comes with the issues that were not taught in medical school to most doctors thus prompting for further training.

There has been good health service delivery though some of this service have not reached the rural areas which means that the governments in this section should invest more in increasing the areas that their services are provided.

In terms of dealing with crisis both country has done very good by provision of emergency services, they have also been able to partner with other countries and among themselves to ensure that they deliver the best services as expected of them

In terms of data, information and accountability both countries have presented their data very well especially the one for Australia unlike the one for New Zealand that leaves a lot of question.

Comparison of workforce planning against WHO recommendations

Conclusion

In general, it can be observed that these countries have a lot in common in terms of their operations and policy in the workforce (Connor, 2016), they have observed the recommendations by the world health organization though there I still a lot that needs to be done for them to fully reach the SDG 3 goal.

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