The World Health Organization, Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean, convened a meeting on health workforce observatories from 23 to 24 October 2017, in Cairo, Egypt.

Sustainable Development Goal 3 highlights the need for substantial increase in the recruitment, development, training and retention of the health workforce. At the 64th Session of the Regional Committee Member States endorsed the Framework for Action for Health Workforce Development to accelerate addressing the health workforce challenges in progress towards universal health coverage and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. One of the main pillars of the Regional Framework for Action, as well as the Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health: Workforce 2030 (adopted in 2016), is to strengthen the data, knowledge and evidence which are crucial for health workforce planning, implementation and monitoring.

Reliable and updated health workforce information to guide health workforce policies and plans is a serious gap in the Region. The need for better data and information has long been acknowledged in the Region which had led to the creation of health workforce observatories as a mechanism and platform to improve health workforce information availability, analysis and use for policy-making a decade ago.

This 2-day meeting, co-hosted by the Regional Office's Department of Health System Development and the Department of Information, Evidence and Research, brought together officials from Member States and experts to discuss strategies for improving health workforce information and evidence in the Region. The meeting introduced the National Health Workforce Accounts as a tool which is a global initiative to this end. It also reviewed health workforce observatories and discussed future strategies in the changing context to accelerate the progress in response to improving health workforce information and evidence.