A New Vision for the Health Workforce: Addressing NCDs, global health security and emergencies
Dates: September 23, 2025, 8:15-10:30am EST
Location: The Harvard Club of New York City or online
Register to join us in-person or online today!
The global health workforce is in crisis. As the world faces multiple overlapping challenges to health, including the escalating burden of noncommunicable diseases, the threat of pandemics and humanitarian crises caused by conflict, climate, economic distress and other emergencies, and the rising global toll on mental health, the demands on health workers have intensified. Yet, support for the health workforce has not kept pace, dramatically compromising access to critical health services for communities around the world, threatening global health security, endangering economic stability and compromising progress toward development targets.
The time to act is now. With a predicted global shortage of 11 million health workers by 2030, ensuring resilient and responsive health systems to meet the needs of communities requires greater and smarter investments in the health workforce. Pragmatic, sustainable solutions. that leverage technology to maximize efficiencies and impact are necessary to address the health workforce challenge. This includes fair pay, mental health support, professional development, and safer working environments for nurses, doctors, community health workers, pharmacists, epidemiologists and their colleagues across all cadres. Investments in health workers yield exponential returns, from economic stability to climate resilience, gender equity and social stability and, of course, the actualization of high-level political commitments to advancing health in every community across the world. When health workers flourish, each one of us reaps the benefits.
But what will this look like? How can we re-envision the future of the health workforce?