What was the challenge?
The new Footscray Hospital doubles capacity, from 252 to 508 beds, with 44 emergency department cubicles, 66 new mental health beds, 22 ICU beds and 32 CCU beds. Western Health needed to know, years out, how many staff that hospital would need, and then needed that number to stay right as the plans changed.
Two things made it hard. About 40% of Footscray campus cost centres work across Western Health, so the existing workforce had to be separated from pay data before the new site could be modelled on its own. And at the start, the only description of the hospital was a functional brief: the models of care, floor plans and rostering practices that decide a workforce didn't exist yet.
What did Health-e do?
Health-e loaded payroll, masterfile, organisation structure, functional brief and activity data into a predictive modeller and built three models of the opening workforce, at 50%, 75% and 100% of capacity, straight from the functional brief.
Those were the starting point, not the answer. As the project ran, Health-e worked with Western Health's planning team through interviews on rostering, skill mix and floor plan use, and the models were corrected as service delivery was defined. The team built up the assumptions for the opening organisation together; as opening approached, each assumption was replaced with a decision, and the model moved with it. The model was never frozen. At every point it reflected what was known, so the workforce number was always current.
Departments were segmented between Footscray, Sunshine and Williamstown so each site carried only its own workforce. Export templates, shortfall reports and user access manuals were provided so Western Health could run and refresh the models itself.
What were the results?
The new Footscray Hospital opened on 18 February 2026, with the first patients transferred from 7.30am and the emergency department taking new presentations from 8am. By then the model was fact: Western Health knew how many staff, in which roles, were needed to open the hospital and run it from day one, and had put more than 4,500 staff through onsite training to be ready.
Because the model carried a current headcount throughout, Western Health used it well beyond workforce planning. Peak headcount from the profiles fed evacuation planning, car parking, amenities such as the number of toilets, and the cleaning load. None of those are workforce questions, but each one is easier to answer when the number of people in the building is right.
The three opening scenarios gave the executive a workforce for each stage of ramp-up, and the campus-wide view set the new hospital's workforce alongside the staff who carry on working across Western Health's other sites.
What does this make possible?
A new hospital can be staffed from a model that was right the whole way through, rather than one built once and argued over at the end. Each service decision updates the workforce immediately, so the executive is never working from a stale number.
And because the model holds people, not just positions, it answers the questions that come after the workforce one: how many people will be in the building at peak, and what that means for safety, parking and the facility itself.
Western Health is now applying the same approach to the new Melton Hospital.