The complete picture for the 57 crisis countries

To illustrate the importance of population growth in health workforce planning, we estimated health workforce requirements in the year 2050 under two different population growth scenarios presented in the 2010 UN revisions: the high and the low variant projections. It is important to keep in mind that the fertility, mortality, and migration assumptions underlying the 2010 UN projections were not the same for all the crisis countries.

 
For example, the UN classified countries in one of three groups (United Nations 2011c):
 
  1. High-fertility countries: Countries that until 2010 had no fertility reduction or only an incipient decline
  2. Medium-fertility countries: Countries where fertility has been declining but whose estimated level was still above 2.1 children per woman in 2005–2010
  3. Low-fertility countries: Countries with total fertility at or below 2.1 children per woman in 2005–2010. Each group has different fertility assumptions underlying the population growth projections for the time period.
 
Similarly, countries highly affected by HIV/AIDS had different sets of mortality assumptions than those less affected. For this reason, comparisons of data across countries should be undertaken with caution. All data used in the estimations, as well as the source or method of calculation of each data element, are provided in the appendix.
 
For all countries, regardless of their population size, their populations are growing, which will necessitate increased production of health workers to meet the populations’ health needs. However, if countries are able to implement policies and programs that result in smaller population growth rates over the coming decades, the number of new health workers they would have to produce could be significantly smaller. For example, across the 57 crisis countries, approximately 9.5 million health workers are needed in 2050 to achieve the threshold health worker density ratio under the low variant projection. By contrast, approximately 12.4 million health workers are needed in 2050 to meet the threshold under the high variant projection—a difference of 31% between the high and low variant projections. Among individual countries, Somalia has the lowest percent difference (21%) of additional health workers needed between the two projections, while Lesotho has the highest percent difference (41%).