The 74th World Health Assembly WHO
Global Strategic Directions for Nursing and Midwifery Report 2021-2025
The 74th World Health Assembly (WHA) commenced on the 24 May 2021 and will run until the 1 June 2021. A series of strategic briefings are being held virtually over the week and will explore this year’s theme ‘Ending this pandemic, preventing the next: building together a healthier, safer and fairer world.’
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus, Director-General, WHO
In 2020, the 73rd WHA requested World Health Oragnization to engage with all WHO regions to update the Global Strategic Direction report for Nursing and Midwifery 2016-2020, (SDNM), and develop a draft report for 2021-2025. The draft SDNM 2021-2025 report was submitted for a series of 10 consultation with regional and global consultations with government chief nursing and midwifery officers and relevant stakeholder in December 2020, and opened for comments between, 31 January 2021 and 3 March 2021. The final draft SDNM 2021-2025 report recommends four key policy areas of focus for the improvement in the quality of global nursing and midwifery workforce. The four key areas include:
- Strengthening education capacity and quality, to educate enough nurses and midwives with knowledge, competencies and attitudes to fully meet the demand of health system and population health priorities.
- Creating job opportunities, to effectively recruit and retain nurses and midwives in demanding areas to improve health services access. Meanwhile, ethically managing international mobility and migration.
- Building leadership capacity, to strengthen and establish national senior leadership roles for future nursing and midwifery policy-makers.
- Optimizing practice to maximize the contributions of nurses and midwives in health service delivery. While updating practice regulations to provide decent work, such as equitable pay, labour protection and rights, and the prevention of all forms of violence and harassment.
The final draft SDNM 2021-2025 report has been submitted for consideration by the 74th WHA during the agenda item 15, Health Workforce.
The provisional agenda for the 74th WHA can found be here.
The live streaming of the 74th WHA can be found here.
