EPHO7: Assuring a sufficient and competent public health workforce
The purpose of this essential public health operation (EPHO) is to ensure that there is a relevant and competent public health workforce sufficient for the needs of the population it is designed to serve. Investment in and development of a public health workforce is an essential prerequisite for adequate delivery and implementation of public health services and activities. Human resource is the most important resource in delivering public health services. This operation includes the education, training, development and evaluation of the public health workforce in order to efficiently address priority public health problems and to adequately evaluate public health activities.
A recent self-assessment of public health services in 41 of the 53 countries in the WHO European Region found that:
- University level public health education has seen a rapid expansion in capacity over recent years. Examples exist mostly in Western Europe and are composed of well defined and regulated specialist public health training programmes. These programmes exercise multidisciplinary approaches to their public health workforce and systems of continued professional development and accreditation.
- The majority of self-assessments indicate workforce capacity as the major limitation of public health services. Only a few countries in the Region have an overall public health workforce plan.
- Only a small number of countries have a defined postgraduate specialist public health training programme. In addition, most countries do not define core competencies regarding public health for the public health workforce.
- Leadership capacity in public health was widely reported as being insufficient. This was seen as an issue for political cross-sector leadership and for the public health workforce.
- Some states noted that the small size of their national population was a barrier to support effective training of highly specialised and expensive public health staff.
As a result a recommendation was made to develop public health workforce plans that detail the numbers and range of public health staff needed, and take into account their training, curriculum development, core competencies, accreditation, leadership skills, mentoring, and continued professional development. Health professionals and the wider workforce should be provided tailored training programmes.
Technical assistance, including capacity building and learning exchange
WHO/Europe works with countries to build and support a critical mass of human resources in countries and to support countries in sharing the lessons learnt from specific interventions at national and sub-national levels. Currently the the main focus of WHO/Europe’s work is on health professionals. Further work is needed on public health professional workforce development.
Health workforce
WHO helps countries in addressing health workforce challenges in key areas including expanding the evidence base for decision-making on health workforce, strengthening governance capacity and health workforce planning, enhancing health workforce performance, and working on health workforce migration, retention and ethical recruitment.
In 2010 the WHO Global Code of Practice was adopted by the 63rd World Health Assembly. The code is the only global framework for international cooperation on health workforce recruitment. It provides key guidance to countries on internationally-accepted ethical norms and principles related to health workforce migration.
