Toolkit for country health workforce strengthening

The health workforce plays a central and critical role in improving access to quality health care for the population. Mechanisms for optimizing the skills and skill-mix of health professionals will be essential to strengthening health systems and achieving better health outcomes. It is critically important that Member States develop policies that will ensure availability of enough health workers with the relevant skill-mix, competences and motivation to provide health services to their populations. Recent global and regional efforts have reiterated the urgency of addressing the increasing challenges for health workforces; these include shortages, imbalances, educational quality and productivity concerns.

Strategies for human resources planning should adopt a comprehensive perspective by addressing demand, supply and mobility. Approaches that focus on the training of individuals without taking into account the work environment and mobility, will have limited success. Scaling up education in an isolated way will not compensate for weak motivation, high attrition, and increasing mobility.

Building on the momentum created by various initiatives, the World Health Organization is undertaking actions which aim to enable countries to move forward with developing concrete national health workforce policies and strategies.