Abstract
The study aimed to project the health workforce requirements to provide long term care for the
dependent older people in Thailand. The descriptive study comprised 2 steps, primary and secondary
data collection and forecasting for health workforce requirements for the long term care services. Survey
conducted at 66 public and private long term care institutions and 130 care managers (CMs) looking
after home health care services. Self-administered questionnaires comprised questions in relation to
service provision, health workforce, quantity of services and time used were applied. The health need
method was used to project the health workforce requirements for home health care services and the
population ratio method was then employed to project the health workforce requirements for institutional
care. Health workforces included in the projection were: CM, nurses, doctors, physiotherapists,
social workers, nurse assistants and care givers (CGs). The results showed that when service utilization at
institutional care increased at 10-20% each year, the requirements for CM, nurses, physiotherapists,
doctors, social workers, nurse assistants and CG in 2030 would be 37,235-37,636; 29,520-30,499; 4,858-
5,260; 3,555-4,000; 338-740; 1,613-3,529; and 126,542 -134,312 respectively. Comparing to health workforce
supply of the whole country, it is likely that there would be a critical shortage of nurse and CM.
