The COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to develop more sustainable health workforces

  • PDF / 1,024,354 Bytes
  • 8 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
  • 37 Downloads / 181 Views

DOWNLOAD

REPORT


Open Access

COMMENTARY

The COVID‑19 pandemic presents an opportunity to develop more sustainable health workforces Ivy Lynn Bourgeault1*  , Claudia B. Maier2, Marjolein Dieleman3, Jane Ball4, Adrian MacKenzie5, Susan Nancarrow6, Gustavo Nigenda7 and Mohsin Sidat8

Abstract  This commentary addresses the critically important role of health workers in their countries’ more immediate responses to COVID-19 outbreaks and provides policy recommendations for more sustainable health workforces. Paradoxically, pandemic response plans in country after country, often fail to explicitly address health workforce requirements and considerations. We recommend that policy and decision-makers at the facility, regional and country-levels need to: integrate explicit health workforce requirements in pandemic response plans, appropriate to its differentiated levels of care, for the short, medium and longer term; ensure safe working conditions with personal protective equipment (PPE) for all deployed health workers including sufficient training to ensure high hygienic and safety standards; recognise the importance of protecting and promoting the psychological health and safety of all health professionals, with a special focus on workers at the point of care; take an explicit gender and social equity lens, when addressing physical and psychological health and safety, recognising that the health workforce is largely made up of women, and that limited resources lead to priority setting and unequitable access to protection; take a whole of the health workforce approach—using the full skill sets of all health workers—across public health and clinical care roles—including those along the training and retirement pipeline—and ensure adequate supervisory structures and operating procedures are in place to ensure inclusive care of high quality; react with solidarity to support regions and countries requiring more surge capacity, especially those with weak health systems and more severe HRH shortages; and acknowledge the need for transparent, flexible and situational leadership styles building on a different set of management skills. Introduction It seems to have taken this pandemic for all of us to more explicitly value health workers. Health workers occupy a unique position in response to COVID-19. The epidemiology of the virus contributes to an unprecedented increase in the volume and acuity demand on the health workforce, while at the same time it diminishes health worker supply. As the backbone of health systems, health *Correspondence: [email protected] 1 School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of Ottawa & Lead, Canadian Health Workforce Network, Ottawa, Canada Full list of author information is available at the end of the article

workers are the key responders to the crisis as it unfolds, and in being at the point of care, they are also most at risk. A useful depiction of the different types of the health impacts of the pandemic over the short, medium and long term is depicted in Fig.  1 [1]. This includes a