Addressing the health workforce crisis: towards a common approach

The existence of a widespread health workforce crisis with the potential to reverse the health gains of the past decade and contribute to the collapse of the health system in some countries is generally acknowledged. The challenge is what to do about it. The World health report 2006: Working together for health asks: "How can a country begin to solve the myriad and complex problems of human resources for health that confront it? Is there a tool or a technical framework that will assist governments and national health workforce planners to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy in a systematic way?"The World health report 2006 presents an evolving technical framework to help countries resolve the problems underlying the crisis. The framework was developed by representatives of multilateral and bilateral agencies, donors, partner countries, nongovernmental organizations and the academic community who came together at an informal consultation sponsored by the World Health Organization and the United States Agency for International Development in Washington, DC, in December 2005. Their goal was to agree on the characteristics of a simple but comprehensive technical framework that would enable countries to develop a concrete national health workforce strategy that could be supported and implemented in a planned and systematic manner.The resulting health workforce framework (Figure 1) presents six components of planning and managing the health workforce so that appropriately trained staff are available in the right places at the right time: health workforce management, policy, finance, education, partnerships and leadership. Health workforce management systems are at the center of the framework because of their importance in integrating all the other components.Subsequent to the December 2005, a steering committee of participants in the consultative meeting and other health workforce experts have defined the six components and their subcomponents (Table 1).The ben