PHEI-WSR: Workforce Measurement Research

Public research brief · Version 0.1 · 2 October 2026

PHEI-WSR is PerdanaHealth's proposed individual-level healthcare-workforce measurement instrument. Its purpose is to investigate how working conditions, access to support and wider health-equity determinants relate to workers' experiences, rather than reducing professional value to a single score.

Research purpose

• Population: Healthcare workers in a defined, consenting study population. The profession, employment context, language and setting will be specified in the approved protocol.
• Unit of observation: An individual participant, distinct from an area-level equity index and from the PHEI-R clinic respondent questionnaire.
• Intended use: Instrument development and feasibility research, followed by appropriately designed measurement-property studies. Employment screening, disciplinary decisions and fitness-to-practise decisions are outside the proposed use.

Development pathway

The proposed sequence begins with an explicit construct definition and item dictionary. Independent subject review and worker input then examine relevance, coverage and how questions are understood, before a bounded field-feasibility study.

• Content and comprehension: Record the rationale for each item, response options, recall period and interpretation across intended language groups.
• Study design: Pre-specify the primary endpoint, sampling approach, missing-data handling, comparators and analysis. A proposed content domain is not automatically a validated subscale.
• Measurement evaluation: Study the properties relevant to the intended construct and use. COSMIN guidance distinguishes content validity, reliability, construct validity and other measurement properties; it does not confer validation on a newly named instrument (COSMIN study-design checklist).
• Version control: Maintain a dated instrument, change log, analysis plan and decision record before comparing results between versions.

Participant protection

The proposed protocol requires a documented ethics determination, written site permission, informed consent and a defined data-management plan before recruitment. Managers should receive only appropriately protected aggregate reporting, not identifiable individual responses. Participation and withdrawal must not affect employment or access to support.

Any concerning response requiring support must follow an approved pathway with a named human reviewer. The research instrument will not diagnose or autonomously direct treatment.

Current status and collaboration

PHEI-WSR is in research development; this brief reports no validation findings, recruitment totals or completed fieldwork. It does not reproduce a final questionnaire, scoring formula or clinical threshold.

PerdanaHealth welcomes methodological, worker-representative and institutional collaboration to refine the construct and study design. Confirmed sites, reviewers and results will be named only when the relevant permissions and publication decisions are complete.