Okuzeka
Healthcare Management vocabulary · Staffing and Workforce

Workforce planning

Meaning in healthcare management, with examples

nounCommon term

In healthcare management, workforce planning means: Planning how many staff, with which skills, an organisation will need in the future, and how it will recruit, train and keep them.

In Turkish: iş gücü planlaması, insan kaynakları planlaması, personel planlaması

How it is used

Done at hospital, regional and national level. Workforce planning looks at retirements, staff leaving, training numbers and changes in demand. Managers present workforce plans together with budgets, because staff are the largest cost.

Example sentences

  1. Our workforce planning shows that a quarter of our theatre nurses will retire within five years.

  2. Good workforce planning means we do not have to rely on agency staff all the time.

Common collocations

  • workforce planning model
  • long-term workforce planning
  • workforce plan
  • workforce shortage
  • staffingThe number and type of staff working in a hospital, ward or shift, and the work of making sure there are enough of them with the right skills.
  • FTEShort for full-time equivalent: a unit that adds up working hours, so that one full-time worker counts as 1.0 and two half-time workers also make 1.0.
  • staff turnoverThe rate at which employees leave an organisation and have to be replaced, usually shown as a percentage of staff per year.
  • skill mixThe combination of staff with different roles, grades and levels of experience in a team, such as the ratio of registered nurses to care assistants.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Staffing and Workforce

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level:

This page explains English vocabulary for learners. It is not medical advice.