Health Worker Shortage
Health systems are short millions of staff, and the gap is widening where need is greatest.
Severity score
51.0
Severe · default weighting
Trajectory
Worsening
What this is
The world faces a projected shortfall of around ten million health workers by 2030, concentrated in Africa and Southeast Asia. Active recruitment by wealthy countries deepens the gap. Every other health problem on this index gets worse when there is nobody to treat it.
Score breakdown
Loss of life
44Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.
Lives negatively impacted
84People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.
Financial cost
52Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.
Environmental impact
1Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.
Trajectory
62Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.