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Joan Stephenson, PhD

JAMA. 2008;299(15):1764.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 144 words of the full text and any section headings.

At a meeting of nearly 1500 experts, donors, health ministers, and others in Uganda last month, participants endorsed a plan to address the shortages of health workers around the world and to reduce the migration of health professionals from developing countries to richer nations (http://www.who.int/workforcealliance/forum/2_declaration_final.pdf).

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there is a global shortfall of more than 4 million health workers, one-quarter of whom are needed in sub-Saharan Africa alone.

The plan, the Kampala Declaration and Agenda for Global Action, calls on all countries to work together to address health worker shortages and for wealthier countries to give "high priority and adequate funding to train and recruit sufficient health personnel from within their own country." It also directs the meeting's organizer, the WHO-backed Global Health Workforce Alliance (http://www.who.int/workforcealliance/en/), to monitor the agreement's implementation.