One billion people are affected by global shortage of healthcare workers

The critical shortage of skilled health personnel, especially in remote areas of the world, is a major obstacle to meeting the United Nations’ millennium development goals by 2015, say the organisers of the second Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, held last week in Bangkok.

The Global Health Workforce Alliance, a partnership of national governments, civil society groups, international agencies, finance institutions, researchers, educators, and professional associations that aims to bridge the gap in the supply of healthcare personnel, says that a billion people in 57 countries “face a daily struggle to access basic healthcare due to health workforce shortages and uneven distribution of health workers within countries.”

Hundreds of thousands of people, mostly in rural areas of the world’s poorest countries, “live and die without ever seeing a trained health worker,” the alliance says. Yet some developed countries continue to “import large numbers of health workers from developing countries to fill their own health workforce gaps.”

Although many developing nations are trying to deal with the shortage of health workers, “they lack sufficient long-term financing and capacity to plan and implement programmes to sustain improvements.”

Mubashar Sheikh, the alliance’s executive director, said that the World Health Organization estimates that “4.3 million health workers are needed to address the global shortage. These workers need to be accessible, deployed, and distributed appropriately to make an impact and improve overall health.”

In the forum’s outcome document the participants agreed that “all people, everywhere, shall have access to a skilled, motivated and supported health worker within a robust health system.” Noting major recent developments, including last year’s WHO global code of practice on the international recruitment of health personnel, they identified eight requirements for progress to be sustained:

• • Education and training capacity “has to increase to match the growing demand for health personnel”

• • Reliable information must be collected, collated, analysed, and shared to inform policy making, planning, and management

• • Leadership by “all state and non-state actors at global, regional, national and local levels” is required to focus action on the health workforce, including workforce planning

• • Collaboration and mutual accountability are needed

• • Strategies for distribution and retention should be adopted “to attract and retain health workers with appropriate skills mix in rural and other under-served areas”

• • Performance and quality should improve through accreditation and compliance with appropriate national standards for educational institutions and individual healthcare workers

• • Effective regulation, including the new code of conduct, will ensure the quality and safety of care, and

• • A combination of domestic and international resources must be deployed to develop the healthcare workforce.