EOFY Healthcare Staffing Audit: Costs, Coverage & Care
Before you plan for FY27, it’s worth asking: did your staffing actually work this year?
June has a way of sneaking up on healthcare managers. Suddenly EOFY is here, and you’re already thinking about what the next twelve months need to look like. It’s a busy time and honestly, stopping to review last year’s staffing data can feel like one more thing on a very long list.
But this is exactly the right moment to do it. Your staffing decisions from the past year are still fresh, the patterns are visible in the data, and the findings can directly shape how you plan, budget, and hire going into FY27.
Healthcare staffing in Australia is not getting simpler. According to Grand View Research, the Australian healthcare staffing market is projected to grow at 6.7% annually through to 2035. Meanwhile, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) reports that the fill rate for health professionals now sits at just 44%, down from around 60% only a few years ago. The workforce pressures that defined 2025 are not going anywhere. If you want FY27 to run more smoothly than this year, the audit is where that starts.
Vacancy Fill Rate and What’s Hiding Inside It
Start here. Your overall fill rate tells you how many of your open roles were filled across the year but the number that matters even more is what’s underneath it. A strong average can easily mask a specific department, specialty, or shift pattern where vacancies kept reopening or took far too long to close.
Look at fill rate by ward, by role type, and by time of year. If one area kept struggling while others performed well, that pattern deserves a closer look, because it is usually telling you something about the brief, the sourcing channel, or the conditions attached to those roles that is worth addressing before the same thing happens in FY27.
In regional and remote settings especially, fill rate pressure tends to be persistent. According to the AIHW, around 7 million Australian, roughly around 27% of the population live outside major cities, and access to health services in those areas is consistently harder to maintain. Flexible models including FIFO schedules, block rotations, and travel-supported placements have made a genuine difference for providers willing to think creatively about how roles are structured.
The True Cost of Vacancy
Every open shift has a cost and it is almost always higher than it looks on a budget spreadsheet. When a nursing role goes unfilled, what follows is a chain reaction: existing staff cover the gap through overtime, fatigue builds, agency coverage is arranged at short notice, and the quality of handovers can slip. None of that shows up as a single line item, but it adds up fast.
The point here is not to avoid agency or flexible staffing both are genuinely valuable parts of a well-run workforce model. It is to make sure vacancy costs are visible and accounted for, so you can make informed decisions about where investment in retention or faster hiring would actually pay off.
Agency Spend - Planned vs Reactive
Agency and flexible staffing is an essential, valuable part of how healthcare facilities operate and let’s be honest, in healthcare there will always be a level of last-minute need that simply cannot be planned for. Sickness happens, situations change, and that is exactly what agency staffing is there for. The question worth asking at EOFY is not whether you used agency support, but whether you got the most out of it.
Where you can plan ahead covering predictable leave peaks, seasonal surges, or known roster gaps doing so gives you more time to find the right person, at a better rate, without the pressure of a same-day scramble. Looking back at your agency spend across the year, were there patterns of demand you could get ahead of in FY27? That is a really useful question to bring into your budget conversations.
“The facilities we work with that manage their agency spend most effectively are the ones who treat it as part of their workforce plan, not just a response to it. They still need us at short notice sometimes everyone does but by anticipating the pressure points they can, they move faster, spend smarter, and keep their permanent teams feeling supported rather than stretched.”
Credentialing and Compliance Timelines
This one is easy to overlook in a staffing audit, but it has a direct impact on how quickly your hires can actually start contributing. In healthcare, even when a candidate accepts an offer quickly, credentialing and compliance checks can add significant time before a start date is confirmed and in a competitive market, that delay can sometimes mean losing a great candidate to a facility that moved faster.
According to IMS People’s 2026 Staffing Landscape Guide, healthcare recruitment success in 2026 increasingly depends on process discipline across credential checks, documentation control, and fit-for-purpose matching particularly with the new Aged Care Act now in effect since November 2025 and compliance expectations continuing to tighten. Take a look at how long credentialing took on average across your hires this year. If there are steps that could be streamlined, delegated, or partially automated, EOFY is the right time to make those changes before the next intake begins.
Retention: Your Most Underrated Staffing Metric
How many of the people you hired this year are still with you? And of those who left, how many went within the first twelve months? First-year retention is one of the most honest indicators of whether your hiring is producing good long-term outcomes or just filling seats temporarily.
Nurses and allied health professionals today are clear about what keeps them in a role. Competitive pay, genuine flexibility, transparent career pathways, and a supportive team culture. When those things are in place, the cycle of rehiring the same positions year after year starts to slow down.
According to the 2025 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, reducing nurse turnover by just 1% can save a hospital around $289,000 per year. That is not a marginal gain it is a meaningful return on investing in the people already doing the work.
Making the Audit Work for You
You do not need a sophisticated analytics platform to do a useful staffing audit. You need honest answers to a handful of questions: Where did roles stay open longest? What did vacancies actually cost us this year? Was our agency spending planned or reactive? Are we retaining the people we hire?
The answers will point you toward the things most worth changing and give you a much stronger foundation for the workforce conversations that come with EOFY planning.
At Express Healthcare Staffing, we work alongside healthcare facilities across Australia and New Zealand to make sense of exactly these kinds of questions whether that means helping you fill a gap quickly, build a stronger permanent team, or think through a workforce model that holds up better in FY27. If it would help to have that conversation, we would love to hear from you.
Sources
Grand View Research, Australia Healthcare Staffing Market Size & Outlook 2035, May 2026 · AIHW, Rural and Remote Health, 2025 · AIHW, Health Workforce Australia, 2024 · Nursa, Operationalizing the RETAIN Framework: Calculating the Cost of Nurse Turnover in Practice, March 2026 · NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, 2025 · IMS People, Recruitment Australia 2026: Staffing Landscape Guide, January 2026 · Department of Health and Aged Care, New Aged Care Act, November 2025