In January 2023, AAHMS submitted a letter as part of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) consultation on its draft data strategy.

The Academy welcome AHPRA’s work to develop a data strategy that will guide how it uses the data it collects and holds, and we are grateful for the opportunity to provide input.

In October 2022, the Academy a report, Research and innovation as core functions of the health system: A vision for the future of health in Australia. The report found that clinician researchers lie at the heart of a research-rich health system that values and promotes evidence-based care.

At present, there is no clear picture of how many clinician researchers there are in Australia, the training pathways they have taken, the settings in which they work, or their employment arrangements. These data gaps have impacted on Australia’s ability to grow and nurture this workforce.

The Academy welcomes the draft data strategy objective to ‘support workforce planning for a sustainable health workforce’. As AHPRA considers how it uses and shares its existing data as part of this objective, we would urge that it also consider reviewing its processes to ensure it can collect the highest quality data related to the Australian clinician researcher workforce.

We acknowledge there is no one organisation that is responsible for collecting and sharing this type of data; however, AHPRA is well-placed to fill some of the existing gaps. We urge AHRPA to consider refining its data collection process to better enable thorough, high-quality collection and analyses of the clinician researcher workforce in the future.

Our full submission can be downloaded below.