Our Mission & Vision
Who We Are
The Frontline Health Workers Coalition is an alliance of United States-based and international organizations working together to urge greater and more strategic US and multilateral investments in frontline health workers in low- and middle-income countries as a cost-effective way to save lives and foster a healthier, safer, and more prosperous world.
Our Vision
We believe that every community should have access to health workers trained and supported to provide all essential health services and to prevent, detect, and respond to new and emerging health threats.
Why it Matters
Improving access to health workers with the right skills, in the right numbers, and in the right places is crucial to global health progress. Threats such as Ebola and Zika can be halted when health workers coordinate community-level prevention, detection, and response efforts. Maternal and newborn mortality can largely be prevented when skilled birth attendants are present. The spread of HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria can be slowed when health workers promote awareness, conduct testing, and provide treatment. And health workers can both prevent, treat, and care for the growing burden of non-communicable diseases worldwide.
Moreover, investment in health employment has bears tremendous economic returns - estimated at 9:1 globally by the by the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Commission on Health Employment and Economic Growth, an investment that holds particular promise for women’s economic empowerment.
Yet, the world faces an acute and growing shortage of frontline health workers. More than 400 million people worldwide lack access to essential services provided by health workers. Consequently, millions of people die or are disabled every year from preventable causes. The health workforce shortage is expected to more than double to 18 million by 2030 without immediate and strategic investments.
The U.S. government’s goals of ensuring global health security, ending preventable child and maternal deaths, and controlling and ending the HIV/AIDS epidemic cannot be achieved without significantly more support to strengthen the global frontline health workforce. Strong national health workforce plans in every country that are adequately financed from multiple sources -- as called for in the Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health: Workforce 2030 -- is also critical in achieving the targets in the Sustainable Development Goals, including the goal for universal health coverage (UHC). As global crises such as Ebola epidemic in West Africa or regular deliberate attacks on frontline health workers have tragically demonstrated, access to competent, supported, and safe frontline health workers must no longer languish as a global health policy afterthought.