Improved access to quality essential health services irrespective of gender, age or disability

The Secretariat will step up its leadership by: advocating to strengthen capacity across all WHO Member States for a multidisciplinary workforce to undertake the essential public health functions, including emergency preparedness and response; and strengthening communities of practice and networking among all health and care occupations involved in the delivery of health services and public health functions. This includes the evolving work with those occupations represented in the World Health Professions Alliance, a Nursing and Midwifery Global Community of Practice and the work endorsed by the G20 with associations, institutions and schools of public health. The Secretariat will support countries to: develop and implement updated health and care workforce strategies, policies and investment plans to address health workforce bottlenecks and inefficiencies based on national context, national models of care reforms, essential packages of health services, and essential public health functions. These need to be informed by a health labour market data and analysis, and with multisectoral and multistakeholder dialogue; mobilize partnerships and adequate funding from domestic sources as well as donor sources, to sustain the recurrent cost of the supply, recruitment, deployment, protection and retention of competent, skilled and motivated health workers. In countries with critical health workforce shortages, mobilize international financing institutions to support the infrastructure/capital investments needed to expand health and care workforce supply and create safe and enabling environment for delivering quality primary health care for all; ensure safe and decent work for health and care workers, including secure income and employment, optimal working conditions, equal opportunity, labour and social protections, and respect for rights at work, as well as the prevention of violence against, and sexual harassment of health and care workers; reorient and reform workforce models, occupations, and delivery teams (for example, with respect to adequate classification, skills mix, roles and scopes of practice) in order to effectively and efficiently deliver essential packages of health services and essential public health functions. Reorganize scopes of practice, if needed, to expand access to critical services and optimize primary care delivery; strengthen and align education, training, competencies and lifelong learning towards producing the skills needed to deliver integrated and people-centred health and care services, including the delivery of essential public health functions based on a primary health care approach; strengthen health and care workforce data collection, analysis and reporting, through the national health workforce accounts, including disaggregated data; improve the access and distribution of the workforce through appropriate strategies (for example, regulations, financial and non-financial incentives, education, infrastructure) to recruit and deploy health workers in rural, hard-to-reach and underserved areas; strengthen the governance functions and capacity of national regulatory authorities to appropriately regulate health professional education and practice, including public and private sector actors; support management of the international mobility of health workers, including through bilateral and regional cooperation, as well as by reporting on the implementation of the WHO Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel; build a critical mass of workforce leadership and institutional capacity on health and care workforce policy, planning, management and development, and its related functions and systems.