2020: International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife

Fast Facts

• Nurses and midwives provide a broad range of essential services close to the community and in all levels of health facility.
• Nurses and midwives provide essential health services, including e.g: Prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of HIV, tuberculosis, malaria and other communicable diseases Prevention, diagnosis and treatment of noncommunicable diseases Sexual and reproductive health services, including family planning, and maternal and newborn health care, including immunization and breastfeeding support.
• Nurses and midwives play a key role in caring for people everywhere, including in the most difficult humanitarian, fragile and conflict-affected settings.
• As part of strong multidisciplinary healthcare teams, nurses and midwives make a significant contribution to delivering on the commitments made in the 2018 Astana Declaration on Primary Health Care, ensuring patient-centred care close to the community.
• Achieving health for all will depend on there being sufficient numbers of well-trained and educated, regulated and well supported nurses and midwives, who receive pay and recognition commensurate with the services and quality of care that they provide.
• The world needs 18 million more health workers to achieve and sustain universal health coverage by 2030. Approximately half of that shortfall – 9 million health workers – are nurses and midwives. The most acute shortages of nurses and midwives are in South East Asia and Africa.
• Globally, 70% of the health and social workforce are women. Nurses and midwives represent a large portion of this.
• Midwifery, where care includes proven interventions for maternal and newborn health as well as for family planning could avert over 80% of all maternal deaths, stillbirths and neonatal deaths. Midwife-led continuity of care, where a known midwife or group of midwives provides care from pregnancy to the end of the postnatal period, can prevent 24% of pre-term births.