01 Mar HRH2030 Director’s Digest: March 2021
March 2021: Resilience, Round 2
Dear Colleagues,
A little more than a year ago, we launched our Health Workforce Resilience Prize, a global competition designed to recognize successful solutions from low- and middle-income countries that strengthen the resilience of the health workforce. Just a few weeks later, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, and countries have faced continued shocks—and setbacks—ever since.
HRH2030 began this year by noting that there would be no “return to normal” after the prolonged pandemic and focusing on the adaptations and innovations we’ve learned since March 2020 as we move forward. In a new blog, we highlight some lessons learned and shared during our January webinar, when we brought health workforce experts together to discuss the way forward.
Health system resilience continues to be a key to the way forward, and so we’ve checked in with one of our two Health Workforce Resilience prize winners, Nyaya Health Nepal. Their team has learned that adoption of innovation is important for building and sustaining a resilient system. Our own team members in Indonesia have been focusing on innovations and investments to improve decisions related to the health workforce issues for years now. These investments paid off during the pandemic, enabling a more rapid response in terms of deploying the health workforce, thanks to their ongoing commitment to implementing the WHO National Health Workforce Accounts (NHWA). We’ve published a new case study examining Indonesia’s progress on optimizing its health workforce information and data.
It wasn’t only the health workforce that was affected by COVID-19—over this last year, the social service workforce has also had to innovate rapidly to continue to support their clients. We have previously advocated for more integration between these two sectors, and later this month we will be hosting a live event around that same topic. Integrating the Health and Social Service Sectors to Achieve Health for All will bring together panelists representing the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance, the WHO, PEPFAR-funded programming supporting orphans and vulnerable children, and our partner in Colombia, the Colombian Family Welfare Institute. We are looking forward to a lively discussion. There’s still time to join us. Register here. This event is the first in a series of end-of-program legacy events we will be hosting now through June.
Next week, we’ll be celebrating International Women’s Day. For those of you on Twitter and Facebook, please follow our social media campaign there, launching on Friday and running through March 8. If you’re looking for resources on the topic of women in health leadership and gender, we’ve updated our compendium of resources. You can find it here.
Thanks to all of you who are contributing to resilient health and social service systems around the world.
Best,
Wanda Jaskiewicz
Project Director, HRH2030