At a glance
- A global healthcare worker shortage of at least ten million is expected by 2030.
- Closing that shortage could avert 189 million years of life lost to early death and disability and boost the global economy by $1.1 trillion.
- While known supply-side interventions that enable the workforce to grow, thrive, and stay can add about 5.6 million healthcare workers, this is not enough to close the gap. Closing it will require transforming healthcare service delivery—reimagining who provides healthcare, how services are delivered, and where care is accessed.
Over the last century, people have lived longer, yet the portion of life spent in poor health remains unchanged, resulting in more years battling chronic and infectious diseases. Individuals face a growing reality: Access to healthcare professionals when one is sick, elderly, or in pain can no longer be taken for granted.
That is because a global shortage of at least ten million healthcare workers is expected in 2030, according to the World Health Organization, with upper estimates over 78 million. Without enough healthcare workers to deliver care, fewer people have access to services that save lives and improve quality of life.
Currently, nearly 60 percent of the global population—approximately 4.5 billion individuals—lack access to essential health services. These services include immunization, safe pregnancy and childbirth practices, prevention and treatment of infectious diseases, and management of chronic or noncommunicable conditions. In practical terms, the consequences include delays that affect patient experience, such as waiting longer for a hip or knee surgery, and tragic outcomes, such as mothers and newborns dying in childbirth due to a lack of qualified health workers. Developing and retaining sufficient healthcare workers to assist those who are ill and promote healthy living is a challenge that affects almost every country. It is also a challenge that cannot be addressed solely by the healthcare industry. Rather, it will take a global movement in which public and private stakeholders inside and outside healthcare invest and innovate.
Addressing the healthcare worker shortage is an opportunity to profoundly advance health worldwide, adding years to life and life to years. Closing this shortage could avert 189 million years of life lost to early death and lived with disability, accounting for 7 percent of all disease burden. To put this into context, closing the shortage would have as much positive benefit as eliminating the disease burden stemming from maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality conditions.
Closing the healthcare worker gap can also have an immense impact on the global economy to the tune of $1.1 trillion, roughly equal to the GDP of Switzerland. The analysis finds that around $300 billion of that could be a direct result of the greater number of healthcare worker jobs. However, the much larger economic stimulus comes from the ripple effects healthcare workers have on making all workforces healthier and indirectly creating non-healthcare jobs.
The shortage of healthcare workers and the potential for improvement are not evenly distributed globally. Africa, with 17 percent of the world’s population, accounts for 52 percent of the shortage and over 70 percent of the opportunity to reduce disease burden. However, less than 20 percent of the GDP opportunity is concentrated in Africa, highlighting the variation in disease burden averted and GDP gained by closing the shortage. Further, while global life expectancy at birth could be extended a year and a half by eliminating the worker shortage, this improvement pales in comparison to the potential for Africa, where individuals could live seven years longer.
The healthcare workforce needs attention, investment, and innovation. In this report, we consider how to address the healthcare worker shortage by not only increasing the supply of healthcare workers but also fundamentally reimagining the “who,” “how,” and “where” of healthcare service delivery.
Four country archetypes represent how challenges and priorities differ based on healthcare workforce dynamics.
Each country faces unique supply and demand dynamics in the healthcare labor market, so customizing solutions is essential for addressing the global shortage. Solutions cannot be limited to recruiting more healthcare workers based on population needs; countries also must ensure there are enough available healthcare jobs in a region or country.
Countries can be categorized based on whether they have enough healthcare workers relative to population needs and enough employment opportunities for new and existing healthcare professionals. Either of these may reflect deeper challenges such as economic, educational, or policy constraints. To help stakeholders frame potential opportunities for improvement, we categorized countries by these two dimensions to define four archetypes.
Examination of these archetypes shows that each comes with its own challenges. More than half of all countries, representing 71 percent of the global population, are worker-scarce countries, with a low number of healthcare workers relative to the population but many open healthcare jobs. These countries have a median of 98 healthcare workers per 10,000 population. These are mostly middle-income countries across Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East.
Worker- and job-scarce countries—those with the dual challenge of not enough healthcare workers and not enough available healthcare jobs to meet population health needs—include 42 countries, mostly low- and middle-income countries on the African continent. They have a median of 32 healthcare workers per 10,000 population, less than one-third the global median. These countries experience poorer health outcomes than the rest of the world: an individual’s median health-adjusted life expectancy is 55 years, compared with a global median health-adjusted life expectancy of 63 years, and their disease burden is nearly a third higher than the global median.
Worker-advantaged countries, where relatively more healthcare workers serve their populations than the global median but some healthcare jobs are unfilled, include 47 countries, primarily in North America and Europe. These countries have more than three times the global median of healthcare workers per capita and more than ten times the median of worker- and job-scarce countries. They typically have better health outcomes, with an average health-adjusted life expectancy at birth of 70 years, compared with the global median of 63 years, with a roughly 8 percent lower disease burden.
Worker-surplus countries have more trained healthcare workers than available jobs. While this phenomenon may occur on a subnational level, no countries currently fit this archetype. Everyone bears the burden of the shortage.
A country cannot change from a scarcity archetype solely by adding more healthcare workers. Rather, countries need a broader lens that accounts for investment, regional and national priorities, and infrastructure.
Scaling known interventions from the Healthcare Workforce Triangle can enable the workforce to Grow, Thrive, and Stay.
How could public- and private-sector entities come together to strengthen the healthcare workforce in ways that reflect their country’s needs? In this report, we focus on three types of strategies, which form what we call the Healthcare Workforce Triangle:
- Grow. Expand the talent pipeline by reimagining training program structure, timing, and scale.
- Thrive. Free up healthcare workers’ time to focus on delivering quality care to more patients.
- Stay. Improve retention of healthcare workers by addressing the root causes of burnout and attrition.
Together, these interventions can improve the supply of healthcare workers, adding more than 5.6 million workers to the global healthcare workforce.
Grow: Expand the talent pipeline by reimagining the structure, timing, and scale of training
A shortage of clinical training positions and skilled educators is a major barrier to expanding the healthcare workforce. Existing training programs have limited capacity—in terms of both school enrollment and clinical experience positions—that restrict the number of graduates entering the field. In the United States, for example, there were more than twice as many applicants as available spots for medical school in 2024. Expanding the talent pipeline could add 1.9 million healthcare workers globally. This is especially important in worker-scarce countries, which have high rates of job vacancy.
Expand enrollment capacity with additional training sites and educators
Expanding the pipeline will likely necessitate increasing school capacity and attracting additional educators. This involves assessing the specific needs of a country based on its archetype and introducing a range of educational opportunities for prospective healthcare workers, such as pharmacists, imaging technicians, nurses, and more.
Add additional schools and sites to train the next generation. A shortage of training opportunities, including limited positions in medical schools, nursing programs, and clinical training sites, limits the number of healthcare professionals entering the workforce. Some countries are addressing this challenge through policy initiatives that expand training infrastructure, particularly in underserved municipalities.For instance, Brazil established over 160 new medical schools from 2013 to 2023, expanding its physician graduate population. This expansion helped increase Brazil’s primary-care physician workforce by 12 percent, which has been associated with a 1.4 percent reduction in mortality. Other strategies to expand training sites include establishing centers of excellence for specialized training and forging partnerships between governments and private hospitals to expand residency slots, as India and Tanzania have done.
Encourage flexible clinical faculty positions. Not only are clinical workers aging out of the profession, but so are the teachers of these workers. In Canada, almost half of surveyed nursing faculty were over the age of 50, and 18 percent were above 60, nearing retirement in the next five years. Such a phenomenon runs the risk of leaving training facilities with inadequate faculty to meet student demand. One way to address this challenge is by offering phased retirement, which allows faculty to start working fewer hours at a reduced salary but with full benefits. Keeping faculty in the workforce longer could help retain experienced staff, which would ease staffing shortages and reduce strain on the healthcare system. Early research suggests that older working adults could become more engaged and productive in the workplace through phased retirement. This strategy has the potential to maintain clinical faculty in the healthcare industry beyond traditional retirement age.
Adopt innovative training approaches
To address the healthcare workforce shortage, it may be necessary for countries to reassess the duration of certain educational programs or explore methods for accelerating student training. This could also involve integrating innovative technologies, such as virtual reality simulations and AI-driven learning platforms.
Shorten program duration to increase the number of annual graduates. Shorter, innovative training models should still focus on quality while acknowledging that accelerated programs can ease the financial burden on students. In the United States, accelerated nursing program graduates nearly doubled between 2013 and 2023, adding about 8,000 nursing graduates annually. The accelerated bachelor of science in nursing (ABSN) allows students to start working after a 12- to 18-month training period—half the training time of traditional programs. Other countries offering accelerated nursing programs include Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the United Kingdom, the National Health Service offers accelerated programs for specialties such as speech and occupational therapy, nursing, and physiotherapy. This can make it easier for nurses to start jobs and has helped attract professionals from a diverse range of fields while maintaining the rigor and quality of training.
Employ digital methods to improve training completion and licensure rates. Scalable tech-enabled training approaches, such as those that utilize mobile learning applications, e-learning platforms, and content production studios, can help bridge critical training gaps, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. In Uganda, for example, integrating interactive displays into medical training not only improved access to quality training in remote areas but also improved training outcomes for healthcare professionals.
Recent advancements in technology have made virtual reality a new pathway to train healthcare workers for some portion of their training, with its effectiveness comparable to that of traditional settings. In 2020, the Purdue Global School of Nursing started using virtual reality as an experiment. Students could practice procedures such as inserting a catheter and placing an IV in virtual reality. Now VR headsets are an essential tool in their nursing curriculum, and licensure examination pass rates have increased by 10 percent. Other programs have used VR for dementia training, neurogenerative decline, or to understand hearing and vision loss. This approach creates a scalable pathway to expand access to training in areas with limited educational options.
Thrive: Free up healthcare workers’ time to focus on delivering quality care to more patients
Healthcare workers face simultaneous pressures from rising patient demand and administrative burdens, limiting the time they can spend on direct patient care. McKinsey’s research has shown that up to 30 percent of nurses’ tasks could be automated or delegated, freeing up time for more meaningful work. Rapid advancements in AI technology could help streamline workflows by summarizing notes, drafting discharge summaries, automating documentation, and improving task prioritization. While numerous pilots exist, broader implementation remains limited. MHI estimates that freeing up healthcare workers’ time could create the equivalent of two million additional workers, a crucial strategy for worker-advantaged countries.
Ensure the right tasks are completed by the right people at the right time and in the right place
Even when
Written By:
