Best Investment for a Healthier World

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 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 trained, paid, and supported health workers who are able to provide essential health services and respond to 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 Covid-19 and Ebola 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 shortage of frontline health workers. At least half of 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 world is facing a shortage of 10 million health workers 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.