Analysing the health labour market is essential to achieve a better understanding of the forces that drive health worker shortages and surpluses, skills mix and geographical imbalances and suboptimal performance, and to develop effective policies to address these issues.

To that end, the Health Labour Market team develops guidance and technical products related to health labour market analysis and is conducting health labour market analyses in countries together with colleagues from WHO regions and WHO country offices.

A well conducted health labour market analysis is critical to providing reliable information on the main dimensions of the health workforce, notably in terms of availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality. Health labour market analysis is not an end on its own but a crucial element in health workforce policy development and is instrumental in answering important policy questions related to health workforce.

Resolution WHA69.19 on the Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health: Workforce 2030, adopted by the 69th World Health Assembly in May 2016 includes three key actions related to assessing the health workforce implications of health policy and programmes:

• Development partners, including bilateral partners and multilateral aid mechanisms, will augment, coordinate and align their investments in education, employment, health, gender and labour in support of domestic financing aimed at addressing national health workforce priorities
• Global health initiatives will ensure that all grants include an assessment of health workforce implications, leverage national coordination and leadership, and contribute to efficient investment in and effective implementation of national health workforce policies
• An assessment of the health workforce implications will be made for technical resolutions brought before the World Health Assembly and WHO regional committees.

This section presents health workforce impact assessments for technical documents that have been submitted for discussion by the Executive Board and World Health Assembly.