A Message from the Guest Editor

Readers of Healthcare Management Forum might be curious about why we have a special edition dedicated to health workforce data in support of more robust planning, and why for health leaders specifically?

It is certain that health leaders appreciate the important input the health workforce provides to both current and future health service delivery. Health leaders know that health workers are the face of our healthcare system and healthcare organizations. When Canadians seek care, it is from one or more of our highly trained and skilled health workers. What Canadians appreciate about our publicly funded healthcare system is their ability to access the knowledge and care of health workers who work within this system, ideally in a timely manner. Canadians are increasingly worried about the growing gap in their ability to access care from health workers, and they are also worried about the health of health workers. Canadians and Canadian health leaders see the direct link between the numbers, availability, and support of health workers and patient access.

In the spring of 2021, at the height of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 80 national, provincial and territorial health workforce stakeholders and over 300 health leaders came together and signed a Call to Action for better support for health workers through better data for workforce planning. These leaders made a case for more upstream and foundational investments in support of better planning for the health workforce that Canadians need now and into the future. It is remarkable that organizations and associations who are often seen to be at odds with each other regarding some health policy directions, all agreed on this basic premise.

The federal, provincial and territorial governments and pan-Canadian organizations responded. In the Fall of 2021, the Canadian Institute for Health Research (CIHR) funded an expansive partnership initiative led by the Canadian Health Workforce Network (CHWN) to develop a health workforce Minimum Data Standard (MDS) fit for planning purposes that can be adopted by health professional regulatory authorities, associations, employers, and others. In 2022, the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI) refreshed their own MDS for health workforce data, with a commitment to continue refining it for continuous quality improvement. In 2023, the federal government created Health Workforce Canada, a new pan-Canadian health organization with a mandate to continue enhancing health workforce data for planning with support from CIHI and Statistics Canada. Health Canada led an initiative to study and create a pan-Canadian workforce plan for physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists, and occupational therapists, with a particular focus on primary care; the Caring for Canadians report was released in 2025.

Leaders of healthcare and healthcare professional organizations continue to appreciate how better health workforce data are foundational to better health system performance. They also understand how the alignment of data, planning, policy, and management is integral to ongoing system sustainability and responsiveness. In this special edition, we highlight some other important developments that have led up to or happened in the years since our Call to Action, which we hope will inspire even greater involvement in health workforce data development, planning and supports. The importance of these developments was notably salient during the COVID-19 pandemic but is just as relevant in a post-pandemic context to sustain the health workforce.

The first set of articles highlights the intersecting themes of better utilizing existing data to address key health workforce questions, whether that be through Statistics Canada data or through underutilized administrative and registry datasets, augmenting them where they are limited so as to better inform planning, and the importance of developing partnerships to build analytic capacity for better decision-making.

We start with Masoud and co-authors who showcase the use of five different Statistics Canada data sources through three case studies that assess job vacancies, the integration of internationally educated healthcare professionals, and the work and life stress of personal support workers and nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors strongly encourage greater utilization of these vital national datasets to inform decisions that help support system sustainability.

Gupta and co-authors provide another excellent example of utilizing Statistics Canada data to examine whether the health workforce reflects the sociodemographic diversity of the population served. Drawing upon census data on the oral healthcare workforce, they describe the gender, geographic, and other equity imbalances in access and pay, while also making the case for academic partnerships to help address limitations in health workforce analytic capacity.

Similarly, Zagrodney and co-authors provide unique first-person accounts of their experiences utilizing a variety of existing datasets to address organizational imperatives as well as their efforts to develop data assets from internal administrative sources within their own organizations. Their article also highlights the important role that can be played by embedded health workforce data scientists within healthcare organizations—in their case a home care service provider—and how these investments yield excellent returns on knowledge generation.

Moving to the Long-Term Care (LTC) sector, Miller and co-authors describe how they are beginning to address limitations in health workforce data in that sector through the recently established OnSPARK Data Platform. They detail how standardized and de-identified administrative data from over 200 LTC homes are being collected and analysed to produce real-time, unit-level insights to support performance benchmarking and policy simulation for overall quality improvement.

Reflecting international leading practices to optimize health professional registry data for workforce decision-making, Chandrasekera and co-author describe the case of an innovative equity-focused data collection initiative undertaken by the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers. They provide an excellent example of how a range of demographic data can be sensitively collected from health workers at registration to support advancing equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism efforts.

Reminding us of the health workforce dimensions of the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action, now in their 10^th year, Williams details important legal and legislative considerations when developing and supporting Indigenous health workers. Drawing upon a review of relevant legislation, the author presents insightful and scalable promising practices—using the concept of Heart Knowledge as a wholistic tool—non-Indigenous organizations can use to increase the recruitment and retention of Indigenous health workers.

Next, we move to a set of three articles focused on the utilization of comparable data across groups of health workers for health workforce modelling and planning.

MacKenzie brings us a case study from Nova Scotia detailing efforts to implement inter-professional needs-based workforce planning and highlighting the important progress made in the province during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued challenges yet to be overcome. This article emphasizes that system leaders must take note of the importance of investments into data standards and standardized measures to ensure more efficient and effective workforce planning.

Chamberland-Rowe and co-author detail an approach to workforce planning applied to a regional geography that links population needs with maternity care workforce supply in the Champlain Region in Ontario. The work undertaken to standardize provider data, which required linking available administrative data about physicians from the Canadian Institute of Health Information with fit for purpose empirically gathered data on midwifery services, was a particularly unique contribution. This study further supports the call for standardized data development across a broader range of health workers.

Simkin and co-authors describe another regional partnership to advance inter-professional primary care workforce planning in the City of Toronto. Detailing how health workforce planning is more than just a modelling exercise, they describe how health workforce data can be transformed into actionable intelligence to support a range of integrated decision-making partners through a transferable six-step planning process. Again, the theme of embedded research and decision-maker partnerships is noted.

Data utilization and development are one set of concerns—but data liberation enabling timely access and linkages are equally important considerations. The final article from Formoso and co-authors tell an important and truly Canadian story—replete with references to moose hunting—about the groundbreaking work in New Brunswick to liberate and link data in support of research on the recruitment and retention of health professionals in that province. These efforts highlight the vital role that secure data centres, such as DataNB in New Brunswick, can play to safely and securely curate the data needed for timely, accessible and high-quality provincial analysis. Such a promising practice is worthy of exploring how it could be spread and scaled for interprovincial and pan-Canadian analysis.

Together, the articles in this special edition highlight some of the leading approaches to using data to address critical questions for planning and other health workforce challenges. With these data stories, we hope to inspire even more partnerships between health leaders and health workforce researchers, including in embedded roles, and to encourage leaders to leverage data to help make more evidence-informed decisions. To augment this even further, embedding a core set of competencies in health workforce data utilization, development and analysis combined with leading practices in health workforce planning into training programs for health leaders and health professionals will enhance health workforce analytic capacity. Here too, there are important and timely initiatives to report—such as a partnership between the Canadian College of Health Leaders and the University of Ottawa Microprogram in Health Workforce Studies—creating a unique health workforce speciality for leaders of health professions and healthcare organizations.

Despite these important and timely developments, we cannot be complacent. Indeed, we have been here before when in the early 2000s there were similar groundswells of support for health workforce planning in Canada. And yet, without sustained innovation and infrastructure development, interest waned over time. Let us not make that same mistake again. Let us learn from these and other case studies and work together in partnership to spread and scale these innovations in support of health workers and the Canadians who need their care.