Health human resource planning in home care: how to approach it--that is the question.

In her paper, MacAdam refers to future challenges in health human resources for the home-care sector. This paper builds on her comments and discusses conceptual and practical approaches to future planning of health human resources. Necessary national data requirements are identified for this type of planning. The authors point out the limitations of traditional supply-side modelling and describe a new framework linking population health needs to outcomes that builds upon earlier conceptual work in needs-based, utilization-based and effective demand-based models.