Renewing commitments to strengthen health workforce
More than a quarter of world's countries still struggling to provide basic healthcare due to health workforce shortfalls
The panel and audience put their 'Hands-Up for Health Workers' in solidarity.Photo: Global Health Workforce Alliance
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. The critical shortage of skilled personnel, especially in remote areas of the world, is a major obstacle to meeting the UN MDGs by 2015. The need to expand and strengthen the health workforce was the focus of national and international leaders and experts at the Second Global Forum on Human Resources for Health in Bangkok, Thailand recently. The participants agreed the key actions to accelerate progress to implement the Kampala declaration and agenda for global action, the roadmap adopted in 2008 to drive improvements in the health workforce. The crisis situation is diverse in different countries. For example, in Bangladesh the ratio of doctor and nurse is much deviated form the ideal situation. The progress report on the Kampala Declaration reveals that there was no progress on the mechanism to inform policy making and policies to favour in-country retention of health workers. A high level delegation from the government of Bangladesh including the Minister of Health and Family Welfare attended the Forum who seems to be committed to invest in the sector. The task now is to take the momentum from Bangkok out into the wider world: to move together, from commitment into action, to translate resolution into results, and ensure that every person, whoever they are and wherever they live, has access to a health worker.
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