Distinguished delegates,

Despite the recent pandemic and other health crises highlighting the need for a resilient health and care workforce, we remain off track to reduce the global shortfall of health workers by 2030. The projected global shortage of 11.1 million health workers by 2030 is deeply concerning.

We welcome the update and efforts to address the four objectives of the global strategy on human resources for health. We also applaud the recommitment of Member States and the WHO to accelerate action on workforce shortages and encourage Member States to support the draft resolution on accelerating action on the global health and care workforce by 2030.

However, the WHO Roadmap to strengthen national health and care workforce capacity for essential public health functions was a missed opportunity to develop policies that would better equip the health workforce, especially at the Primary Health Care (PHC) level, to respond to the growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), including mental health, and neurological conditions.

We urge Member States to prioritise health workforce issues, as they are critical for achieving Universal Health Care (UHC), Child mortality, and NCD related targets. We advocate for the inclusion of health workers, and people with lived experience of NCDs, their families and caregivers in shaping health policies and programs at all levels.

We also call on Member States to conduct health labour market analyses to identify their national policy and fiscal needs for workforce supply and demand. We also urge Member States to invest in training health workers, particularly in areas critical to NCD prevention and control, ensuring they have capacity to deliver age and disability inclusive and gender responsive services; and to invest in digital, data and AI technologies.

The recent WHO Academy can be leveraged to optimize access to workforce competencies, including on NCDs, particularly for health workers in low- and middle- income countries. We highlight the importance of establishing collaborative care models that use multidisciplinary teams, from community health workers to specialists.

Thank you