Preparing the 21st century global healthcare workforce

Open Access
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
To meet the growing global demands of caring for the increasing numbers of patients with chronic conditions, we need to develop a new approach to training Chronic conditions currently account for more than half of the global disease burden and are a primary challenge for 21st century healthcare systems.1 This is a dramatic shift from the health concerns of the 20th century, when acute infectious diseases were the primary focus in every country. While the world is experiencing a rapid transition from acute diseases to chronic health problems, training of the healthcare workforce, however, relies on early 20th century models that emphasise diagnosis and treatment of acute diseases. Educational leaders, health professional bodies, and the World Health Organization recognise such models as inadequate for health workers caring for a growing population of patients with health problems that persist across decades or lifetimes.2–5 Training should be restructured to include a new set of core competencies (knowledge, skills, abilities, personal qualities, experience, or other characteristics)—new “tricks” that prepare 21st century health workers to manage today's most prevalent health problems. The global crisis in the healthcare workforce has attracted much attention in recent years.6–10 There is a global imbalance of human resources for health and, in particular, a shortage of healthcare workers in developing countries.11 Clearly, the scarcity of healthcare workers is cause for concern. Unchecked migration of the workforce from rural to urban areas and from poor to wealthy countries has dire consequences for the health of those living in abandoned communities. The sole focus on the quantity of healthcare workers, however, has obscured a second but equally troubling issue: the quality of the training and preparation of the workforce. There is an obvious mismatch between the most prevalent health problems (that is, chronic …