What we're hoping for at the World Health Assembly

By Vince Blaser, Frontline Health Workers Coalition

The 67th World Health Assembly (WHA), an annual gathering of the world's health ministers, began today in Geneva. This year's WHA comes at a particularly crucial moment for leadership to ensure the world has the health workforce needed to deliver a final push toward achievement of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015, as well as a strategy for health workforce post-2015.

Ahead of the WHA, the Frontline Health Workers Coalition delivered a statement to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, which represents the U.S. at WHA. The statement calls on the U.S at the WHA to:

1. Support adoption of a WHO Executive Board Resolution that urges resolution urges implementation of health workforce strengthening commitments made by 55 WHO member states and 27 other constituencies at the Third Global Forum on Human Resources for Health (HRH) and endorses the Recife Political Declaration agreed to at the Forum.
2. Make clear that it considers country-led strategies to ensure the workforce needed to deliver essential health services a top priority.
3. Highlight U.S. investments to strengthen the global health workforce and the U.S. government's strategic direction for future leadership and investments on this issue.
4. Call on member states to support swift creation and adoption of a global post-2015 HRH strategy, with a strategic focus on frontline health workers.
5. Call for concrete targets for ensuring access to trained and supported health workers to be included in the post-2015 development framework.
6. Support efforts to achieve and monitor health workforce strengthening commitments made at the Third Global Forum on HRH.

Read the full statement here.