The World Health Organization, WHO, is calling on governments and health care leaders to address persistent threats to the health and safety of health workers and patients.
The WHO Director-General, Tedros Ghebreyesus, said this at the media briefing in commemoration of the 2020 World Patient Safety Day.
He said no country, hospital, or clinic can keep its patients safe unless it keeps its health workers safe hence the world body released a Charter on Health Workers Safety towards ensuring that they have safe working conditions, training, pay, and the respect they deserve.
The Charter called on governments and those running health services at local levels to take five actions to better protect health workers.
These include steps to protect health workers from violence, to improve their mental health, and to protect them from physical and biological hazards.
Others are to advance national programmes for health worker safety and to connect health worker safety policies to existing patient safety policies.
Ghebreyesus said the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the extent to which protecting health workers is key to ensuring a functional health system.
While health workers represent less than 3% of the population in the large majority of countries and less than 2% in almost all low and middle-income countries, around 14% of Covid-19 cases reported to WHO are among health workers.
In some countries, the proportion can be as high as 35%. Thousands of health workers infected with Covid-19 have lost their lives worldwide.
In addition to physical risks, the Covid-19 pandemic has placed extraordinary levels of psychological stress on health workers exposed to high-demand settings for long hours, living in constant fear of disease exposure while separated from their families and facing social stigmatisation.
It is on record that before the Covid-19 pandemic, medical professionals were already at higher risk of suicide in all parts of the world.