Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the already low resourced, fragmented and largely unregulated health systems in countries like India. It has only further exacerbated the stress on human resources for health (HRH) in many unanticipated ways. We explored the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on the health workforce in India, and analytically extrapolated the learnings to draw critical components to be addressed in the HRH policies, which can further be used to develop a detailed 'health workforce resilience' policy. We examined the existing literature and media reports published during the pandemic period, covering the gaps and challenges that impeded the performance of the health workers. Recommendations were designed by studying the learnings from various measures taken within India and in some other countries. We identified seven key areas that could be leveraged and improved for strengthening resilience among the health workforce. The system-level factors (at macro level) include developing a health workforce resilience policy, planning and funding for emergency preparedness, stakeholder engagement and incentivization mechanisms; the organization-level factors (meso level) include identifying HRH bench strength, mobilizing the health workforce, psycho-social support, protection from disease; and the individual-level factors (micro level) include measures around self-care by health workers. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the associated factors, we emphasize on developing a future-ready health workforce using a multi-sectoral approach for building its strength and resilience.
Highlights
It is likely that most low and middle-income countries would fail to meet the health workforce requirements for providing advanced preventive and curative healthcare to all their citizens in the near future
The COVID-19 pandemic has once again highlighted the dismal reality of our health systems globally, and it calls for a paradigm shift in the health systems resourcing and policies
Fear of exposure to the virus has led many doctors and nurses to avoid providing services[20] in private hospitals, small nursing homes and routine OPD practice at home. This indirectly heightens the burden on the public sector and increases the risk of consultations with informal providers (IP)[21] in rural areas- which account for 70% of all rural health service providers- who are insufficiently trained on pandemic management
Summary
1. Giorgio Cometto, Health Workforce Department, World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. Resilience, health crisis, COVID-19, human resource for health, health workers, policy framework, health resilience framework. This article is included in the Coronavirus (COVID-19) collection. Disclaimer The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s). Publication in Gates Open Research does not imply endorsement by the Gates Foundation
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