Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the human resources for health in India and key policy areas to build a resilient health workforce

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.