We present a 10-year follow-up study on the state of the psychology workforce within Australian acute public hospitals. Organisational psychologists play a vital role in strategic workforce planning and talent management however a lack of whole of workforce data can create significant challenges for effective decision making. It is established that psychology plays a core role in multidisciplinary care, and psychological intervention increases patient outcomes across a range of physical health issues (Hellstern et al., 2025). Staffing levels and resourcing impacts directly on the quality and quantity of this care. This study builds on a previous survey of the national hospital-based psychology workforce conducted more than a decade ago (Small et al., 2015), over which time substantial changes in service demand, workforce shortages, and health system reform have occurred. We will report contemporary data on staffing levels, service models, and supervision capacity for psychologists and in acute clinical settings (working in both the clinical psychology and clinical neuropsychology spaces). We targeted services that fall under the MM1 tier of the Monash Medical Hospital Model across Australia, as an understanding of these figures are scarce (Jaffe et al., 2025). Services within capital cities in states that do not contain MM1 Services were also included (Hobart, Darwin) to ensure their representation. The survey captures clinical psychologists’ role diversity, including direct clinical care, supervision, and research activities. Supervision and research activities of hospital psychologists are not well-documented (Jackson et al., 2021).
The study will describe the skillset of psychologists currently working in the public hospital sector (e.g., area of practice endorsements), workload of psychologists, and identified clinical needs. This data will allow differential analysis of the workforce based on hospital size, jurisdiction, and service model. This study will also examine persistent challenges such as under-resourcing in both the clinical psychology and clinical neuropsychology areas, wait times, supervision availability, vacancy rates, and turnover factors linked to protected time and career development (Jaffe et al., 2025).
We anticipate that our findings will update and extend previous national benchmarks (Small et al., 2015) and identify persistent and emerging gaps in hospital-based psychology provision and highlight organisational and system-level factors associated with more sustainable services (Jackson et al., 2021; Jaffe et al., 2025; Segal et al., 2018). Implications for the psychology profession, the management and retention of talent, and the utility of psychology placements in providing realistic job previews will be discussed.