Workforce Strategy Starting with Demand
Australia faces an undersupply of 70,707 full-time equivalent nurses by 2035, and NMC's approach starts by asking a different question: what services will we need to deliver, not how many nurses we need.
Health workforce strategy conventionally starts with recruitment targets and hard-to-fill occupations, treating today's operational pressure as a substitute for a genuine long-term plan. The Australian Government's nursing supply and demand modelling projects a shortfall of 70,707 FTE nurses by 2035, and NMC's demand-led methodology, currently applied with Bairnsdale Regional Health Service and piloted using primary healthcare datasets across Gippsland, models the entire clinical and non-clinical workforce against forecast population health demand rather than historical activity. Health services that build workforce plans on a credible demand model, rather than extrapolating the past, make stronger decisions on recruitment, capability and long-term investment.
