About the team

Fundamental questions of health related HR management and planning are often raised: how many health professionals are needed in the forthcoming five to ten years, and what kind of knowledge and skills support care provision, system sustainability, or the optimal working environment. Several crucial factors should be taken into consideration in health workforce planning, e.g. growing challenges concerning healthcare, limited number of financial resources or migration and mobility flows of health professionals.
Through many international projects our experts contributed to the establishment of the the Global and European Union HRH strategy. Since 2015 our Institution operates as a WHO Collaboration Centre in Human Resources for Health Development.
The HRH team of the HSMTC has been collecting HR-related data for more than 20 years in order to effectively appoint and project trends and assign possible actions for health policy and decision makers.

Experts: Eszter Kovács Dr., Edmond Girasek Dr., Edit Eke Dr, 
Péter Szegner, Zoltán Aszalós, Miklós Szócska Dr.
Contact: kovacs.eszter@emk.semmelweis.hu
 

Previous research

HRH research field has a key role in the institute’s activities since its establishment. Through the past few decades we became an important member of the international HRH discussions and debates in several related topics. The aim of the knowledge centre is to implement and design action plans and comprehensive long-term HRH strategies providing practical support to decision makers.

In the past 20 years several research were conducted in the institute:

  • 2003: In cooperation with the Hungarian Resident Association the intentions and features concerning health workforce migration was analysed
  • 2007: International Conference series was held entitled “HRH crisis in healthcare”
    • 1st conference focused on Situation assessment concerning health workforce migratio
    • 2nd conference discussed the Structural changes and human resources
  • 2008: HSMTC in collaboration with the National Employment Foundation conducted a research in the field of national distribution of health professionals, migration potential and attempted to reveal the push and pull factors regarding mobility
  • Health PROMeTHEUS program – for more information please go to Projects and research
  • Joint Action on European Health Workforce Planning and Forecasting – for more information please go to Projects and research

WHO Collaborating Centre

For more than 2 decades Semmelweis University has been working in a close collaboration with the World Health Organisation in order to assure opportunities for professional consultancy and policy dialogues with the aims of arranging knowledge transfer, sharing information, building professional networks meanwhile also emphasizing the important linkage between the results and the evidence-based and informed health policy interventions.
Based on the successful bilateral cooperations HSMTC was assigned to be the WHO Collaborating Centre on Human Resources for Health Development for a 4-year duration on the 17th December of 2015. The institute is committed to represent the professional program of the WHO in the European Region as well as supporting the professional research and educational tasks in the following main areas:

  • Research and publication activities
  • Dissemination and knowledge exchange
  • Professional expertise and guidance
  • Supporting the professional program on the regional and global level
  • Teaching and training activities, and event organisation

Further information is available through the link.

Toolkit

The Toolkit on Health Workforce Planning was designed to support the daily work of colleagues involved in health workforce planning. Health workforce planning is a complex process, in which planning-related processes and existing, planning required data play a significant role. The Toolkit summarizes several aspects of health workforce planning in a practical and user-friendly way, in addition governs the attention of the users to useful materials and action points. The Toolkit is a practical collection of self-evaluation tools that supports the daily activities of planning. The utilization of the Toolkit enables environment screening in health workforce planning and identification of weaknesses and areas of development. The development of the Toolkit was carried out in the framework of the Joint Action on European Health Workforce Planning and Forecasting (JA EUHWF 20122201) programme.

 
Health Mobility Radar
 
Our Centre has been working on the deeper understanding of health workforce mobility in the last few decades. A new project will focus on the establishment of an interactive web-based health workforce mobility map, entitled “Health Mobility Radar”.

This project is running in collaboration with the Directorate General of Human Resources Development at the Hungarian National Healthcare Service Center. This new application will visualize mobility flows of European health professionals, and support the information exchange in the future. Anonymous and aggregated country-level data on health workforce mobility will be used on the platform complying the current data security and privacy standards. We also work for assisting harmonisation of indicators, data and terminology. The health workforce mobility map is beneficial for its users, since it could enable data monitoring, data analyses and foster national and international policy decisions on health workforce issues.

For any further queries of “Health Mobility Radar” project, please contact our colleagues: Eszter Kovacs at kovacs.eszter@emk.semmelweis.hu and Edmond Girasek at girasek@emk.sote.hu.

Flyer of the project