An integrated primary care workforce planning toolkit at the regional level (part 1): qualitative tools compiled for decision-makers in Toronto, Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: A regional health authority in Toronto, Canada, identified health workforce planning as an essential input to the implementation of their comprehensive Primary Care Strategy. The goal of this project was to develop an evidence-informed toolkit for integrated, multi-professional, needs-based primary care workforce planning for the region. This article presents the qualitative workforce planning processes included in the toolkit. METHODS: To inform the workforce planning process, we undertook a targeted review of the health workforce planning literature and an assessment of existing planning models. We assessed models based on their alignment with the core needs and key challenges of the health authority: multi-professional, population needs-based, accommodating short-term planning horizons and multiple planning scales, and addressing key challenges including population mobility and changing provider practice patterns. We also assessed the strength of evidence surrounding the models' performance and acceptability. RESULTS: We developed a fit-for-purpose health workforce planning toolkit, integrating elements from existing models and embedding key features that address the region's specific planning needs and objectives. The toolkit outlines qualitative workforce planning processes, including scenario generation tools that provide opportunities for patient and provider engagement. Tools include STEEPLED Analysis, SWOT Analysis, an adaptation of Porter's Five Forces Framework, and Causal Loop Diagrams. These planning processes enable the selection of policy interventions that are robust to uncertainty and that are appropriate and acceptable at the regional level. CONCLUSIONS: The qualitative inputs that inform health workforce planning processes are often overlooked, but they represent an essential part of an evidence-informed toolkit to support integrated, multi-professional, needs-based primary care workforce planning.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".