World Health Organization to celebrate its 70th anniversary tomorrow.

World Health Organization (WHO) will celebrate its 70th anniversary tomorrow. The tagline for this year's World Health Day is "Universal Health Coverage: everyone, everywhere".

WHO offices worldwide are organizing events to mark the day with WHO Director-General, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus joining celebrations in Sri Lanka. The organisation said in a statement today that with 194 member states, across six regions, and working from more than 150 offices, WHO staff are united to achieve better health for everyone.

World Health Day 2018 falls on the 70th anniversary of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, the United Nations agency set up to handle global public health. The day offers the agency a chance to publicize its 70 years of achievement and a critical need – more health workers, particularly in Africa.

The WHO Constitution came into force on Apr 7, 1948, and the anniversary has been celebrated since 1950 as World Health Day. The agency organizes international, regional and local events on the day.

It has identified the serious shortage of health workers across the world as a critical problem. In an article in the British Medical Journal, the Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) organization criticized the new WHO plan to tackle the global shortage of health workers because it fails to address economic constraints. Countries struggling to address health challenges need sustained international support and targeted measures to address underlying inequities in the global health workforce distribution, according to MSF. The agency sees the shortage as one of the most critical constraints to the achievement of health and development goals.

In its 2006 World Health Report, the WHO estimated that over 4 million more health workers are needed to bridge the gap – with 1.5 million needed for Africa alone.

Across the world, 57 countries have been identified as having “critical shortages” – 36 of these are in Africa.

The strategy forecasts the creation of 40 million additional jobs to meet the global demand by 2030 – but mainly in high and middle income countries. Demand is based on the country’s domestic capacity to fund such jobs and implies only 0.5 million of these extra jobs will be generated in Africa, to meet their total demand of 2.4 million workers. However, calculations based on Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) norms (4.45 professional health workers/1000 inhabitants) indicate that 7.6 million health workers will be needed in Africa in 2030. Benchmarks based on an ability to pay maintain fundamental inequities in target setting and hide the widening mismatch between Human Resources for Health (HRH) needs and availability.