Health and social care in every system and in every country is labour intensive, and must be oriented to people's needs if it is to be effective. It is now widely recognized that human resources for health (HRH) are a key enabler for the attainment of universal health coverage, and for the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3 - Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. As is stressed in the Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health: Workforce 2030, there can be no viable national, or global, health system without an effective health workforce. The Global Strategy, adopted at the Sixty-ninth World Health Assembly in May 2016, challenges the erroneous narrative of health workers as a unit of cost in the production of health. The evidence instead presents an intersectoral agenda on the pre-condition of equitable access to health workers in the attainment of universal health coverage, along with a dynamic labour market understanding of the substantive impact on education, employment, jobs and innovation in the health and social care economy. The Global Strategy, therefore, enables governments and other relevant stakeholders to adopt a holistic, rather than fragmented, approach to ensuring that the health workforce contributes both to improved health and to broader socioeconomic development.