Your Royal Highness Princess Muna al Hussein,
Shukran Jazeelan for joining us, we are very much honoured to have you and we appreciate your continued commitment to the health workforce.
Honourable Ministers, Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,
Good morning. I am honoured to welcome all of our guests, both in person and online, to the Fifth Global Forum on Human Resources for Health.
We are joined by over 3,000 delegates from more than 140 countries. That's a record.
As you know, prior meetings have been hosted all over the world: in Uganda, Thailand, Brazil and Ireland. But this is the first time we've held it here in Geneva at our headquarters.
A warm welcome to you all. Or as the locals say, bienvenue à tous.
This Forum coincides with two important occasions: this week marks World Health Worker Week; and it's also WHO's 75th anniversary.
The WHO Constitution, which entered into force in April 1948, affirmed health as a fundamental human right, and established a clear vision: the highest possible level of health for all people.
That mission is as relevant as ever. 75 years since the founding of WHO, and 7.5 years to the 2030 deadline for the SDGs, we know it can only be achieved with an adequate and well-supported health workforce.
COVID-19 has given the world a new appreciation for the incredible value of health workers. Let me give you one example:
Lucy Nyambura worked as a health promotion officer in Mombasa City, Kenya.
When the pandemic arrived, a strict lockdown was introduced, but it was met with strong resistance by the local community.
As she made her daily rounds, providing information about the dangers of the new virus, Lucy was insulted in the streets, and she and her team sometimes had to stop working for their own safety.
But Lucy kept going back to the community. After weeks of engaging leaders, things started to change. Communities started following COVID-19 guidelines and agreed to be tested. The spread of the virus was curtailed, and the lockdown was removed.
For more than three years, health and care workers like Lucy have stood in the breach between life and death all over the world. They have worked day in and day out to protect us.
But they, and the health systems they work in, are badly over-stretched.
Millions of health and care workers were infected, thousands died, and many of them are simply exhausted from over-work.
Severe disruptions to health systems have led to excess mortality and avoidable deaths in many countries, reversing previous improvements in healthy lives and wellbeing.
The single largest cause of disrupted health services during the pandemic was the shortage of health workers.
And the single largest barrier to delivering vaccines and other life-saving tools to combat COVID-19 was the shortage of health workers.
As my colleague Dr Mike Ryan has said countless times, it's pointless having stuff or tools if you don't have staff.
These shortages are a global challenge.
The poorest nations have as little as one tenth of the health workers of the richest ones. Even high-income countries struggle with national shortages.
Globally, we estimate a projected shortage of ten million health workers by 2030.
This is a substantial improvement on the shortfall of 18 million we projected in 2016. But it is still far too many, and in some parts of the world - Africa, the Middle East, and Small Island Developing States - progress is stagnating.
But high-income countries are not immune. Here in Switzerland, a report last year found a potential shortage of forty-five thousand health workers in the coming years.
Two weeks ago, Romania hosted 50 of the 53 countries in the WHO European region to discuss the same challenge.
The Bucharest Declaration from that meeting underlined the need to address regional shortages through better education, recruitment, and retention.
Shortages result in additional pressure on existing workers, creating stress at work and affecting both physical and mental health.
Since the onset of COVID-19, more than one in three health and care workers have suffered from anxiety and depression. Around half have experienced burnout.
Workers are giving voice to their struggle.
Strikes and industrial action are at record levels: dissatisfaction with working conditions is reported in more than 160 countries.
We face major challenges that demand a major response.
This week, we are focusing on three key themes: protect, invest, together, as our moderator outlined earlier.
First, we call on all countries to protect all health and care workers from violence and discrimination; to protect their labour rights; and to protect them with safe and decent working conditions.
Second, we call on all countries to invest in health and care workers; specifically in decent working conditions, fair pay, and training and leadership.
To address shortages, we must address the supply issue, by learning from each other about how to develop and implement innovative models of education.
Investments in education must be matched to jobs and careers, with the right salaries and incentives.
In many countries, and particularly the poorest ones, the main driver of shortages is insufficient resources to create jobs and pay wages.
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Those new jobs must focus on primary health care and public health.
And we must particularly address the role of women, who account for two-thirds of the health and care workforce.
Too few women are in senior positions in the health sector, and there is a 24% gender pay gap. The glass ceiling must be smashed.
And third, we must act together.
Protecting and investing in health and care workers is not a job for Ministries of Health alone. It's a job that requires political leadership, coordination across the education, employment, gender and finance sectors, as well as government engagement with professional associations, labour unions, civil society and the private sector.
We all have a role to play.
There is no better way to honour the legacy of health and care workers who have lost their lives to COVID-19, or have faced unprecedented challenges, than to protect, invest, together.
We owe it to people like Lucy Nyambura, and the millions of health and care workers who are working today to ensure a safe birth, to vaccinate a child, to treat an illness.
Our work over the next three days is about them.
And I would like to say, thank you Lucy, asante sana Lucy, and all the health and care workers all over the world.
Thank you all for your commitment to a healthier, safer, fairer future for all health and care workers.
I thank you.
