As WHO Raises the 2030 Health Worker Shortfall to 11 Million, a New Volume Maps the Future of Medical Education
The World Health Organization’s National Health Workforce Accounts: Health Workforce Levels and Trends 2026 report puts the global health workforce at just over 70 million people, 67% of them women, and raises its projected 2030 shortfall to 11 million workers — up from a 2022 estimate of 10 million. The report’s conclusion is blunt: workforce growth has slowed even as demand keeps rising, and on current trends the gap is not closing. Behind that number sits a training-capacity problem: health systems cannot hire their way out of a shortage faster than medical schools can produce competent graduates.
Modern Medical Education: Preparing for the Future, edited by John Sandars (Edge Hill University), Shabih Zaidi (al-Sadiq International Virtual University), and Ali N. Zaidi (Mount Sinai Hospital), addresses that capacity question directly. Across 41 chapters, it sets out where medical training needs to go next — competency-based and flexible postgraduate curricula, interprofessional education, simulation-based clinical skills training, and continuing professional development for educators themselves — naming the barriers to each change and practical ways past them.
The volume supports three concrete institutional tasks: curriculum committees can use the postgraduate curriculum chapter’s competency-based, lifelong-learning model as a working framework for redesign; faculty development offices can build continuing professional development pathways directly from the educator-competency chapter; and institutional leadership planning for training capacity in under-resourced settings has a chapter built for exactly that problem, rather than a general theory to adapt.
For medical school and academic health science libraries, a workforce shortfall this size is not an abstract policy debate — it is the problem their own institutions are trying to solve by training more clinicians, faster, without lowering the bar. This volume gives faculty development offices and curriculum committees a single, current reference spanning the entire training pipeline, making it a direct addition to core holdings in medical education.
CLNZ Books supplies medical school and academic health science libraries worldwide with current medical education titles, backed by institutional invoicing and worldwide shipping.
Q&A
How large is the projected global health worker shortage by 2030?
WHO’s 2026 workforce report raises the projected 2030 shortfall to 11 million workers, up from a 2022 estimate of 10 million, against a current global workforce of just over 70 million.
What does Modern Medical Education: Preparing for the Future cover?
It covers the full span of medical training across 41 chapters — undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum design, clinical skills, assessment, simulation, interprofessional education, and faculty development.
How does this book address competency-based medical education?
A dedicated chapter sets out a postgraduate curriculum model built around flexible, competency-based, lifelong-learning principles, one of the volume’s core organising themes.
Does the book address medical education in low-resource settings?
Yes — a dedicated chapter covers the future of medical education in resource-constrained settings, reflecting the volume’s global perspective on training reform.
Where can I buy Modern Medical Education: Preparing for the Future?
It is available for order directly through CLNZ Books, with worldwide shipping for academic and professional libraries.