Yesterday I did a lengthy post on some of the Workforce Planning considerations that need to be considered in the fight against the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak currently underway in West Africa. One of my key recommendations to those with an ability to elicit change was to put more focus on data-gaps in a range of key job roles, rather than just counting the HCW dead.

One of the issues that I discovered during my writing yesterday is that if I was a Workforce Planner working on the requirements of this outbreak I need to start to split my base level, or Hard-to-Fill (HtF) roles into another group. The new group would be defined as Hard-to-Replace (HtR) roles, which is a role that has become highly risk adverse to long lengths of medical treatment or fatality. The EVD outbreak has, to 14 September 2014 claimed more than 150 Health Care Worker lives and infected more than 300 including some of the Operationally Critical Job Roles (OCJR) in a region which was largely devoid of a depth of professional skill-sets, especially those with health training.

In response to the lack of publically sourced infographics in this space I thought I would complete something new which focussed on Health Care Workers. The term Health Care Workers is a Job Family and a very high level broad brush. It would be more relevant, given the loss of hundreds in this skill-set to start concentrating on how many Specialists, GPs and Nurses that we needed to replace.

That aside, the three most impact countries are Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia have lost more than 300 Health Care Workers to EVD in recent months. Here is an infographic to emphasise the losses on the ground:

Here is the data from the most recent update provided by the WHO:

In summary I would like to congratulate the WHO on their fantastic epidemiological data that comes out of their offices in what some are calling the worst health disaster in many generations. My main contention from my PeakJobs piece was to suggest the need for updating the global public, not only in the lagging indicators (such as the deaths of individuals or HCW’s) but to also emphasise the demand analysis side.

Demand analysis of recent losses and a massive surge in HCW resources in the fight against EVD will stop the outbreak, treat the infected more efficiently, assist with essential services (such as sanitation and logistics), preserve stability and prevent further outbreaks.

All the things that the UN suggested were possible with Resolution 2177.

Data Sources

[1] United Nations Security Council. With Spread of Ebola Outpacing Response, Security Council Adopts Resolution 2177 (2014) Urging Immediate Action, End to Isolation of Affected States. Accessed 20 September 2014.

[2] World Health Organisation. Ebola Response Roadmap: 28 August 2014. Pg. 5. Accessed 5 September 2014.