Population Growth and the Global Health Workforce Crisis

With an estimated shortage of more than four million health workers worldwide, the global health workforce crisis is possibly the greatest health system constraint on countries seeking to meet their 2015 Millennium Development Goals (World Health Organization 2006). The World Health Organization and global health advocates have called attention to this crisis by monitoring the number of health workers (doctors, nurses, and midwives) per 1,000 population, an access measure commonly referred to as the health worker density ratio. The global health community is committed to supporting countries in addressing their health workforce crises; however, planning and policy efforts to improve the health worker density ratio have disproportionately focused on increasing the ratio’s numerator (health workers), while paying scant attention to the ratio’s denominator (population size). 

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