Global Health Nursing & Midwifery
Health Worker Shortages and Global Justice
Given our discussions on nurses working together with CHWs, I wanted to draw attention to a recent posting on GHDonline's Young Professional Chronic Disease Network (by Sandeep Kishore 11/4/11). To join this community, please visit: http://www.ghdonline.org/yp-chronic/
Sandeep posted an interesting resource titled "Health Worker Shortages and Global Justice" published this year by the Milbank Memorial Fund. Their findings demonstrate that 4.3 million more health workers will be needed to meet the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). They identify an "extreme imbalance" in the distribution of the 12 million working nurses worldwide (there are 10 times the number of nurses:population in Europe than Africa or South East Asia, as well as in North America compared to South America). This shortage is specifically identified as a major factor in early and preventable deaths. What I thought was interesting was the report's admission of the US's contribution to this global shortage and how rather than exclusively training more doctors and nurses, we would do well to reconstitute the health workforce composition. This would include "task-shifting" (or sharing) and increasing the number of trained CHWs.
How would you see this as fitting in to your role as a nurse? Do you work with CHWs in the US now? What would it be like to share responsibilities with CHWs in the US versus in other countries? Would love to hear peoples' thoughts.
-Maggie
Attached resource:
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Health Worker Shortages and Global Justice (external URL) Link leads to: http://www.milbank.org/reports/HealthWorkerShortagesfinal.pdf
Summary: Given our discussions on nurses working together with CHWs, I wanted to draw attention to a recent posting on GHDonline's Young Professional Chronic Disease Network (by Sandeep Kishore 11/4/11). To join this community, please send an email request to .
Sandeep posted an interesting resource titled "Health Worker Shortages and Global Justice" published this year by the Milbank Memorial Fund. Their findings demonstrate that 4.3 million more health workers will be needed to meet the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs). They identify an "extreme imbalance" in the distribution of the 12 million working nurses worldwide (there are 10 times the number of nurses:population in Europe than Africa or South East Asia, as well as in North America compared to South America). This shortage is specifically identified as a major factor in early and preventable deaths. What I thought was interesting was the report's admission of the US's contribution to this global shortage and how rather than exclusively training more doctors and nurses, we would do well to reconstitute the health workforce composition. This would include "task-shifting" (or sharing) and increasing the number of trained CHWs.
How would you see this as fitting in to your role as a nurse? Do you work with CHWs in the US now? What would it be like to share responsibilities with CHWs in the US versus in other countries? Would love to hear peoples' thoughts.
-MaggieSource: Milbank Memorial Fund
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