The health sector future workforce is one of the greatest development challenges of our time. The ageing population affects us on many levels – individual, community, institutional and societal.

The future New Zealand health sector workforce is not only about quantity. It is also about equity and inequality, clinical and non clinical, primary and secondary. As a complex phenomenon, it requires an extraordinary response that comprehensively addresses the multiple factors that fuel its trajectory, progressively realises interventions that energises a sector approach to effective responses.

Programme Incubator is one Hawke’s Bay District Health Boards initiative to address these workforce issues, and is assisting in creating a process of industry intervention within the secondary school environment.