Overview for Health
Why the Workforce is important
In this first decade of the 21st century, immense advances in human well-being coexist with extreme deprivation. In global health we are witnessing the benefits of new medicines and technologies. But there are unprecedented reversals. Life expectancies have collapsed in some of the poorest countries to half the level of the richest -- attributable to the ravages of HIV/AIDS in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and to more than a dozen “failed states”. These setbacks have been accompanied by growing fears, in rich and poor countries alike, of new infectious threats such as SARS and avian influenza and “hidden” behavioural conditions such as mental disorders and domestic violence.
The world community has sufficient financial resources and technologies to tackle most of these health challenges; yet today many national health systems are weak, unresponsive, inequitable even unsafe. What is needed now is political will to implement national plans, together with international cooperation to align resources, harness knowledge and build robust health systems for treating and preventing disease and promoting population health. Developing capable, motivated and supported health workers is essential for overcoming bottlenecks to achieve national and global health goals. Health care is a labour-intensive service industry. Health service providers are the personification of a system’s core values they heal and care for people, ease pain and suffering, prevent disease and mitigate risk the human link that connects knowledge to health action.
At the heart of each and every health system, the workforce is central to advancing health. There is ample evidence that worker numbers and quality are positively associated with immunization coverage, outreach of primary care, and infant, child and maternal survival (see Figure 1). The quality of doctors and the density of their distribution have been shown to correlate with positive outcomes in cardiovascular diseases. Conversely, child malnutrition has worsened with staff cutbacks during health sector reform. Cutting-edge quality improvements of health care are best initiated by workers themselves because they are in the unique position of identifying opportunities for innovation. In health systems, workers function as gatekeepers and navigators for the effective, or wasteful, application of all other resources such as drugs, vaccines and supplies.
Picture Of The Global Workforce
All of us at some stage work for health a mother caring for her child, a son escorting his parents to a hospital, or a healer drawing on ancient wisdom to offer care and solace. This report considers that “Health workers are all people primarily engaged in actions with the primary intent of enhancing health”. This is consistent with the WHO definition of health systems as comprising all activities with the primary goal of improving health inclusive of family caregivers, patient朴rovider partners, parttime workers (especially women), health volunteers and community workers.
Based on new analyses of national censuses, labour surveys and statistical sources, WHO estimates there to be a total of 59.2 million full-time paid health workers worldwide (see Table 1). These workers are in health enterprises whose primary role is to improve health (such as health programmes operated by government or nongovernmental organizations) plus additional health workers in non-health organizations (such as nurses staffing a company or school clinic). Health service providers constitute about two thirds of the global health workforce, while the remaining third is composed of health management and support workers.
Workers are not just individuals but are integral parts of functioning health teams in which each member contributes different skills and performs different functions. Countries demonstrate enormous diversity in the skill mix of health teams. The ratio of nurses to doctors ranges from nearly 8:1 in the African Region to 1.5:1 in the Western Pacific Region. Among countries, there are approximately four nurses per doctor in Canada and the United States of America, while Chile, Peru, El Salvador and Mexico have fewer than one nurse per doctor. The spectrum of essential worker competencies is characterized by imbalances as seen, for example, in the dire shortage of public health specialists and health care managers in many countries. Typically, more than 70% of doctors are male while more than 70% of nurses are female a marked gender imbalance. About two thirds of the workers are in the public sector and one third in the private sector.
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