Aged care workforce industry council

Designing a digital workforce planning tool for the aged care sector.

Problem 

Australia is facing a workforce crisis in the aged care sector. Demand for workers is increasing rapidly due to demographic changes, changes to minimum staffing requirements and new government funding to address unmet needs. These factors are resulting in aged care organisations struggling to effectively plan and prepare their workforce.

The Aged Care Workforce Industry Council (ACWIC) was established to develop and implement the strategies and tools needed to support aged care organisations in overcoming these challenges. They approached Portable to help them to design and build a digital tool for workforce planning for the aged care sector.

Solution 

I worked as the lead content strategist on this project. For this project, we partnered with experts from ACWIC, the Department of Health, a workforce planner specialist and a number of aged care professionals including a CEO, HR directors and people managers. We began by diving into the broad range of research already available to fully understand the problem facing workforce planners in aged care organisations.

We interviewed aged care professionals to understand their needs, expectations and barriers to doing workforce planning. Following this research, we developed initial concepts for the tool and shared them with users and experts to get feedback and iterate on our early ideas.

Once we had a clear idea of what the workforce planning tool needed to include we started working on more detailed content logic for the flow of the tool. I mapped out the complex content logic. It needed to take into account the diverse job roles, responsibilities and obligations in the aged care sector, as well as the regulated number of care minutes being introduced in Australia. 

We regularly shared the content with our design partners to validate and improve. This made sure that the workforce planning tool would ask the right questions, at the right time in a logical order that workforce planners could easily answer. 

Then we moved into prototyping. I worked with a visual designer to take the content logic and translate it into wireframes that we could validate in user testing. As we gained more feedback the wireframes developed from low fidelity outlines to high fidelity prototypes.

Finally, we moved into the development phase of the project. While developers focused on developing the various pages and features of the workforce planning tool I got to work writing the tool’s UX and UI content.

Impact 

ACWIC’s digital workforce planning tool provides a free and standardised approach to workforce planning for aged care organisations in Australia. The tool is supported by clear and accessible descriptions and definitions. It also includes account features, so that users can return to their progress at any time and access data visualisations of their current workforce, their predicted workforce gap and any suggested actions to close that gap.

Read the full case study here.