The Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA), in conjunction with the national boards, is responsible for the national registration process for 15 health professions. The data from this annual registration process, together with data from a workforce survey that is voluntarily completed at the time of registration, forms the National Health Workforce Data set (NHWDS). Data in the NHWDS includes demographic and employment information for registered health professionals. A very small proportion of practitioners complete their workforce surveys on paper forms rather than online. AHPRA provides the completed paper survey forms to the Department for scanning, cleansing, and merging the paper-based survey data into the online registration and survey data set. Changes to the NHWDSAHPRA was established in 2010 under the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme (NRAS). At the commencement of the NRAS, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) was engaged as data custodian of the NHWDS. The AIHW’s contract expired on 30 June 2016, and the Department assumed custodianship of the NHWDS on 1 July 2016. The Department has produced revised NHWDS releases from 2013 onwards. Both the original AIHW data and the Department’s enhanced data from 2013 onwards are publicly available on the Health workforce data tool. These revised NHWDS releases vary somewhat from the AIHW’s original versions due to minor differences in the method of imputation for survey non-response and to the Department’s enhanced geocoding methods, which support a more granular analysis of the geographic distribution of the health workforce. |