WHO is hosting a webinar to launch its framework for countries to achieve an integrated continuum of long-term care.

Poorly integrated health and social care services and a lack of trans-sectoral coordination models are major health system problems. Many healthcare workers are faced with the challenges of closing existing institutional gaps and mitigating policy failures in their day-to-day practices.

The healthcare workforce plays an important role in environmental health and climate protection for two reasons. Healthcare workers themselves are in need of protection.

Across Europe, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated pre-existing problems in the long-term care sector. Nursing homes have long faced a myriad of financial, staffing, and operational difficulties.

The Visegrad countries (Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) were lauded for their early successes in containing the pandemic, but the COVID-19 crisis laid bare some underlying health systems issues. The second wave hit the Visegrad countries much more severely.

In social health insurance countries, the response of primary care to the COVID-19 pandemic has received much less attention than hospitals and their struggle to provide sufficient intensive care beds.

Health and welfare systems in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) have much in common, but the responses to COVID-19 have been very different in terms of health communication, testing and tracing, physical distancing and rules for quarantine and isolation.

Countries are again being confronted with a surge in COVID-19 infections and hospitalizations. Scaling up health workforce capacity for COVID-19 patients is therefore of utmost importance.

The COVID-19 crisis has put huge pressure on financing mechanisms to ensure providers can treat COVID-19 cases whilst maintaining other services and remaining solvent.