2034 outcomes
- Enable modern digitally enabled workplaces supported with guidance on digital best practice.
- Increase data-led public-sector workforce planning and policy for Victoria, and contribute to improved national healthcare workforce planning.
Continuous digital, data and technology innovation is the new normal. It provides opportunities for the Victorian health sector to reimagine delivery of health services.
This continuous innovation, combined with external forces such as the demands on service delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic, has resulted in numerous technology-enabled advances being implemented or scaled across the world. These include the use of drones to deliver medical supplies, virtual reality in rehabilitation and increased use of telehealth.
As digital technologies evolve, our communities and workforces expect the health sector to keep pace with streamlined services that can maximise performance and outcomes.
We will achieve continued digital innovation by implementing Victoria’s digital health roadmap 2021, and through ongoing investment in the infrastructure, skills and training to equip our people to provide contemporary health services.
In the digital era, citizens are surrounded by services and products that seamlessly meet their needs.
Our workforce also increasingly expects systems that are as intuitive and integrated as those they use in everyday life.
The pandemic facilitated upgrades in ICT and infrastructure, but there is a long way to go.
Improving our workforce’s digital experience
Victoria is systematising digital investment by sharing best practices and innovation across the state.
Digital innovation and transformation require strong leadership.
We will promote and build workforce capability in digital, data and technology solutions to ensure our leaders have the skills to promote and deliver large-scale change. We will also ensure our workforces can confidently manage this change.
A shift to cloud-based platforms and the increasing accessibility of artificial intelligence is shaping how organisations drive capacity. This also has the potential to reduce the administrative burden on healthcare workers so they can focus on care.
Achieving strong digital health outcomes for our workforce will be a significant, complex and multi-year proposition for government and the public health system.
It requires us to invest in digital, data, and technology solutions – and our people.
This will ensure that we modernise employment arrangements and use digital channels to deliver new care models and ways of working as they emerge.
Using technology to enhance care
As we build, expand and upgrade Victoria’s health infrastructure to meet evolving community needs, we also need to ensure we use the latest technologies to augment workforce capacity in innovative ways.
This was a key priority for the construction of the $630 million Bendigo Hospital, which is now one of the most technologically advanced hospitals in Australia, featuring several innovations that ensure clinicians can deliver world-class care.
Digital medical records ensure patient health information is not stored in five different systems, but in one unified, safe and secure data bank accessible to clinicians in and outside of the hospital.
This system is complemented by a sophisticated patient entertainment unit, so that patients can view their health information and results at the bedside with their doctor.
The hospital also incorporates 16 different telehealth services that provide specialist consultations to patients living across the Loddon Mallee region.
Telehealth services expand the walls of the hospital to remote and rural hospitals – providing clinical conferencing and training.
Real-time location technology ensures nurses and clinicians can find medical equipment easily and efficiently, while automated guided vehicles transport linen and food via wireless technology.
Complete with the right foundations and information architecture, Bendigo Hospital has the technological capabilities to continue to innovate for the next 20 years. The Bendigo Hospital construction is a brilliant example of how technology, design and community consultation can together create a hospital ready for growth, now and into the future.
Harnessing digital and data solutions for the future
Victorian health workforce data exists across numerous organisations and systems with different reporting standards and cadences.
This means that there are significant challenges for data-led sector workforce planning and understanding workforce supply and demand.
We will work with the Commonwealth and other jurisdictions to improve workforce data capture, integration, sharing and analytics to advance state and national health workforce planning capabilities.
This will give us a greater understanding of workforce supply challenges and where investment in other capabilities, such as technology, can augment workforce capacity.
Robotics, biometrics etc. are talked about, but not yet put all together.
Action areas
The following activities will be delivered in the short-term, from 2024 to 2026.
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- Identify and share leading practice use of innovative technologies in the health sector.
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- Complete a proof of concept for a comprehensive workforce data solution.
- Advance common principles for data capture, sharing, integration and analytics of health workforce data.
- Utilise public sector standards to improve quality and timeliness of health sector workforce data.
Medium-term reforms
- Leverage digital capability to enable employment arrangements that promote workforce quality, flexibility and sustainability.
- Enhance workforce capacity by using innovative technologies to manage repetitive manual tasks.
- Work with the tertiary education sector to determine opportunities to increase graduate knowledge of digital health.
Long-term reforms
- Foster new technologies, such as artificial intelligence and robotics.
- Leverage data as a key strategic asset to identify and define emerging issues and drive informed, data-backed regulatory decisions.
- Advocate for and enable inter-jurisdictional cooperation to create common standards for the capture, storage, integration, and sharing of data.
- Upskill the healthcare workforce for new or evolving digital systems and processes as required.
Reviewed 27 March 2024