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In synthesis, the Strengths were related to the identification of workforce research trends, gaps, leverage points, and profession-specific workforce findings that emerged from cross-professional endeavours.
The Weaknesses include a shortage of workforce research, outdated research findings, lack of uniform and readily available workforce datasets, large heterogeneity in continuous professional development requirements, absence of workforce research programs, over-reliance on descriptive and non-experimental research, rare availability of research on some workforce topics (e.g., international mobility, diversity), and lack of comprehensive situational analysis or deliberative workforce planning and evaluation, among others.
The Opportunities include the existence of guidance and tools for strengthening the health and rehabilitation workforce worldwide, the increased membership from LMICs in WFOT as the international professional federation, and the opportunity to use licensing or registration bodies as a more reliable source of occupational therapy workforce data, to name a few.
Finally, Threats include, but are not limited to, the suboptimal funding of occupational therapy workforce research, the lack of profession-specific data on cross-professional datasets and studies, suboptimal educational capacity in LMICs, frequent lack of professional regulation and reliable workforce data collection, and the current lack of occupational therapy as a discrete profession in the International Standard Classification of Occupations.
Additions that emerged from the experts’ feedback
Components of the final SWOT analysis that emerged specifically from the experts’ input (i.e., bullets without a supportive reference in the Table 1) are outlined below.
Specifically, the additions are related to Opportunities arising from increased societal participation and economic productivity of populations served by occupational therapy as result of workforce scale up investments, as well from the increasing number of occupational therapists with doctoral and master’s level education able to undertake workforce research. An additional Threat was identified in relation to occupational therapy being seen as a lower priority in the health agenda because of a focus on functional and wellbeing outcomes versus survival or other medical outcomes. Finally, the importance of one Weakness was reinforced, notably, the lack of labor market or economic analyses for occupational therapy (e.g., cost of scale ups; return-of-investment analyses); although identified in the scoping reviews,18 this weakness was not explicitly outlined in the initial SWOT.