President Anu Söderström represented COTEC at the EUPHA Health and Care Workforce Section Mid-term Conference – Combating workforce challenges, which was held in Budapest, March 20-21, 2025.

The theme of the conference was Combating workforce challenges. Common challenges in Europe were brought up in several presentations – key challenges of workforce shortages and retention issues are widely recognised.

Conclusions of the panel discussions and presentations were that good governance, multi-stakeholder strategies for advanced resilience and strong collaboration between stakeholders on all levels is required to drive the changes needed.

The EUPHA section on Health and care workforce highlights the care, it is important not only communicate the need for more health and care workers, but to also focus on the care of patients. 

Re-skilling and task-shifting are the trends  that shape workforce development in all fields in Europe and debate on the quality of workforce skills is not to be forgotten when public discussion often focuses on the quantity of qualified staff. Both BeWell project (European project to promote the upskilling and reskilling of the European health workforce) and TaSHI-project (Empowering EU health policies on Task SHIfting) were presented.

Conference highlights can be read here