Are Sustainable Health Workforces Possible? Issues and a Possible Remedy

Gareth H Rees (), Rosemary James, Levan Samadashvili and Cris Scotter
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Gareth H Rees: Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Universidad ESAN, Lima 33, Peru
Rosemary James: Institute for Global Health, University College, London WC1E 6BT, UK
Levan Samadashvili: Innovations and Reforms Center, Tbilisi 0198, Georgia
Cris Scotter: WHO Regional Office for Europe, 2400 Copenhagen, Denmark

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 4, 1-14

Abstract: The 2020–2022 period of the global COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fact that many countries health systems had inadequate health workforce availability. This is despite sustainable health workforces being critical to health service and healthcare delivery, an acknowledgement that drove the significant investment and focus on health workforce development over the previous two decades. As such, this review article discusses health workforce governance and planning, notes its weaknesses, and identifies some of the barriers to the implementation of health workforce policy making and planning and the achievement of sustainable health workforces. Important is the recognition that health workforce planning is long-term in nature, while health workforce decision-making processes are dominated by political processes that have much shorter time frames. The article concludes by offering the approach of backcasting to overcome this dichotomy.

Keywords: sustainable health workforces; health policy; health workforce governance; health workforce planning; backcasting; policy bottleneck (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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