Addressing Global Health Workforce Challenges: Lessons for Building Resilient Health Systems

Across jurisdictions, health workforce pressures are intensifying due to a convergence of forces—demographic change and population ageing, growing burden of chronic and complex disease, global pandemics, fiscal constraints, workforce shortages and maldistribution, industrial and regulatory shifts, and increasing instability driven by climate events, humanitarian crises, migration, and geopolitical uncertainty.

At the same time, rapid advances in digital health and artificial intelligence are reshaping the nature of clinical work, the skills required, and the environments in which care is delivered. These dynamics collectively demand a fundamental re-thinking of how health workforces are planned, supported, and deployed to sustain safe, high-quality care over the coming decade.

Health systems are already experiencing persistent workforce strain through high vacancy rates, increased turnover intent, reduced participation (particularly among early and mid-career clinicians), and escalating psychosocial risk. Many services are operating with limited staffing buffers and constrained surge capacity, leaving them vulnerable not only during emergencies, but also during routine seasonal demand peaks and service expansions.

Meanwhile, the workforce itself is changing with expectations regarding flexibility, safety, wellbeing, professional development, and work-life integration are increasingly shaping recruitment and retention outcomes. This leads to a growing mismatch between the way workforce systems were designed and the realities of modern healthcare delivery.

The research topic “Addressing Global Health Workforce Challenges: Lessons for Building Resilient and Resilient Health Systems” provides a timely platform to explore emerging evidence, evaluate innovations, and share practical and policy-relevant ideas for health workforce resilience. The topic extends beyond any specifc shock event to examine how health systems can move from short-term workforce “fixes” toward deliberate, evidence-informed workforce redesign. This includes strengthening workforce planning and data-driven approaches, improving retention and capability development, creating sustainable models of care, and establishing governance and leadership approaches that support agility, equity, and accountability.

Importantly, this research topic would emphasize workforce sustainability as a strategic imperative—central to service access, quality and safety, financial performance, and system legitimacy. The goal is not simply to document current shortages, but to identify scalable, translatable and sustainable solutions that strengthen workforce capability and resilience under both everyday pressure and future disruption.

Potential areas of interest include:
• How work redesign can address workforce demand and supply match
• How systems should support wellbeing including outcomes such as burnout, moral injury, and psychological safety
• Development and evaluation of recruitment and retention strategies
• Data-driven approaches to workforce planning, forecasting, and governance
• How skill-mix redesign, advanced practice roles, and task sharing can address workforce challenges
• How maldistribution, incentives, and service models affect rural/remote and underserved communities
• How leadership, organisational culture, and workforce engagement can mitigate sustained pressure
• How workforce equity can be established including gender, migrant workers, and the First Nations workforces
• Climate resilience, disaster readiness, and workforce responses to complex emergencies.


The research topic welcomes contributions from diverse disciplines, including health services research, workforce economics, all healthcare professions, occupational health, policy studies, behavioral science, implementation research, and education. This reflects the inherently multidisciplinary nature of workforce challenges.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy and Practice Reviews
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: pandemics, Workforce governance, Workforce shortages, Workforce sustainability, Health Workforce Burnout, Migrant health workers, Rural and remote workforce, Health system leadership

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.