Abu Dhabi’s Public Health Workforce Faces Reform Push to Meet Global Standards

A new study from researchers at United Arab Emirates University and international collaborators has mapped, in unusual detail, what experts say is holding back the public health workforce in Abu Dhabi and the wider United Arab Emirates. Published in BMC Medical Education, the research draws on the views of senior decision-makers and public health stakeholders to argue that the emirate’s workforce reform agenda must align competencies, curricula, regulation and career pathways if it is to deliver evidence-based policy and match global standards. The findings arrive at a moment when health systems worldwide are still digesting the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, and they offer one of the first systematic accounts of how a rapidly transforming Gulf health system perceives its own public health capacity.

The study was conducted as a mixed-methods investigation with public health stakeholders in the UAE between November 2024 and February 2025. The published analysis concentrates on the qualitative strand of the data, which came from two complementary sources: open-ended responses in an online survey completed by 19 participants, and semi-structured interviews with 12 senior decision-makers. Rather than treating these datasets separately, the researchers integrated the survey’s free-text answers with the interview transcripts and analysed them thematically as a single dataset, a technique that strengthens the depth of interpretation when participant numbers are small. The authors are explicit that the findings describe this bounded group of experts in depth rather than producing generalisable estimates for the entire workforce.

Two established frameworks anchored the analysis. The first is the WHO–ASPHER Competency Framework, developed by the World Health Organization together with the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region, which defines the knowledge, skills and behaviours that a modern public health professional should command, from epidemiology and health protection to leadership, ethics and communication. The second is the WHO Health System Building Blocks Framework, which decomposes a health system into six core components: service delivery, the health workforce, health information systems, access to essential medicines, financing, and governance. By reading stakeholder testimony through both lenses simultaneously, the team could connect individual-level skill gaps to system-level structural weaknesses, a technical move that distinguishes this study from simpler workforce surveys.

The thematic analysis surfaced six overarching themes: fragmented governance, competency and training gaps, misalignment between curriculum and practice, Emiratization and career barriers, lessons drawn from COVID-19, and the need for a unified national strategy. Each theme represents a distinct failure mode, but the researchers emphasise that they are interlocking. Fragmented governance, for example, is not merely an administrative inconvenience; it fragments workforce planning itself, so that different institutions train, credential and deploy public health staff against different assumptions. When governance is disjointed, competency frameworks lose their anchoring function, because no single body is responsible for defining what a public health professional in the country should be able to do.

Among the most consequential findings is the limited awareness and use of competency frameworks among stakeholders. International frameworks such as WHO–ASPHER exist precisely to give workforce planners a common vocabulary: they specify the domains in which practitioners must be proficient and allow education providers to design curricula that map onto real occupational requirements. If practising managers and policymakers are largely unaware of these tools, the link between training and employment breaks down. The study found exactly this weak alignment between education and practice, with academic programmes not consistently reflecting the competencies that public health roles in Abu Dhabi actually demand. Graduates may therefore enter the workforce with credentials that employers do not fully recognise, and employers may struggle to articulate the skills they need in a form that educators can act upon.

The question of Emiratization, the national policy of increasing Emirati participation in the workforce, emerged as a theme with particular technical and social complexity. Stakeholders reported limited Emiratization in public health roles specifically, alongside career barriers that discourage nationals from entering or remaining in the field. Public health occupies an awkward position in many health labour markets: it is neither clinical medicine, with its clear prestige and licensure pathways, nor administration, with its conventional civil-service ladders. Without defined career structures, competency-based promotion criteria and visible professional identity, the field struggles to attract and retain national talent. The study suggests that workforce reform cannot be separated from career-pathway design; training pipelines only function when there is a destination at the end of them.

The COVID-19 pandemic functions as both backdrop and catalyst throughout the findings. The authors note that reforming the public health workforce in Abu Dhabi and across the UAE became increasingly urgent during and after the pandemic, alongside wider pressures from evolving public health challenges and health-system transformation. Pandemics are, in effect, unrequested stress tests of workforce planning. They expose shortfalls in surveillance capacity, outbreak investigation, risk communication and health information systems, and they reveal whether governance structures can coordinate across emirates and federal institutions at speed. The stakeholders in this study treated the pandemic experience as a source of concrete lessons about where the UAE’s public health machinery performed well and where structural fragilities appeared, and the researchers folded those lessons directly into their thematic framework.

Governance and policy, together with education and training, were the concerns most consistently raised across both data sources, the survey’s open-ended items and the interviews. That convergence matters methodologically. When two independent modes of data collection, one written and asynchronous, the other conversational and probing, produce the same priority concerns, the risk that findings are artefacts of a single instrument diminishes. The institutional landscape that stakeholders described involves multiple actors, including the Department of Health, the Abu Dhabi Public Health Centre, and the Ministry of Health and Prevention, operating across federal and emirate-level jurisdictions. Fragmentation across these governance structures, the study reports, impedes coherent workforce planning and dilutes accountability for implementing reform.

The study’s conclusions translate these findings into a reform agenda with clearly specified components. The authors argue that public health workforce reform in Abu Dhabi requires a coordinated cross-sector response that aligns competencies, curricula, regulation and career pathways, while strengthening governance, integration and long-term sustainability. In practical terms, that means adopting a national competency framework as the reference standard for job descriptions, accreditation and continuing professional development; redesigning academic curricula so that they map onto that framework; establishing regulatory recognition of public health as a distinct professional discipline; and building career ladders that make the field attractive to Emirati graduates. Each element reinforces the others, which is why the researchers frame the agenda as systemic rather than piecemeal.

The research also carries significance beyond the Gulf. Many health systems, in high-income and middle-income countries alike, confront the same triad of weak workforce data, unclear competency standards and fragmented governance, and the World Health Organization has repeatedly identified health workforce strengthening as one of the binding constraints on universal health coverage and pandemic preparedness. By applying internationally recognised frameworks to a specific national context and publishing the results open access, the team has produced a template that other countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council and beyond can adapt. The study was supported by a research grant from United Arab Emirates University and approved by the university’s Institutional Review Board, with informed consent obtained from all participants. Its authors, spanning institutions in the UAE, Portugal, the Netherlands, Poland and the Czech Republic, present the work as a pathway toward evidence-based policy, and the evidence they have assembled suggests that the pathway runs directly through the people who make public health happen.

Subject of Research: Public health workforce reform and competency-based workforce planning in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates

Article Title: Public health workforce reform in Abu Dhabi: a pathway to evidence-based policy and global standards alignment

Article References: Al Qadiri, T., Elbarazi, I., Elkonaisi, I., Paulo, M. S., Sheek-Hussein, M., Koornneef, E., Czabanowska, K., & Grivna, M. (2026). Public health workforce reform in Abu Dhabi: a pathway to evidence-based policy and global standards alignment. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10518-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10518-x

Keywords: public health workforce, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, WHO-ASPHER Competency Framework, health workforce planning, competency frameworks, medical education, health policy, Emiratization, COVID-19, governance, BMC Medical Education