Who Cares for the Carers? Workforce Resilience on EUSBSR Annual Forum agenda

At the EUSBSR Annual Forum 2026 in Tallinn, where resilience was mostly discussed in terms of security, defence and infrastructure, the breakout session organised by Policy Area Health turned to the people who keep systems running. “Caring for Those Who Care for Us” put the health and social care workforce at the centre of the resilience question.

The numbers set the terms of the discussion. The EU faces a projected shortage of close to one million health and care workers by 2030 while demand keeps rising, the workforce is ageing, and one in three professionals reports anxiety or depression. This is not a workforce preparing for a crisis but one already under sustained pressure.

Opening the session, Ülla-Karin Nurm representing the BSR Mental Health Platform argued that resilience in the Baltic Sea Region rests on people rather than on stockpiles and technical preparedness, and that without physically and mentally well individuals there is no resilient workforce and no resilient services. She also pointed to the more hopeful side of the evidence, that much of the strain on frontline workers is preventable through decisive leadership, social support, stable conditions and greater autonomy at work.

Moderated by Karolina Mackiewicz, the session then challenged the idea that resilience is something individuals can be expected to supply. Mairi Savage of Karolinska Institutet presented it instead as a capacity shaped by teams, organisations and systems, noting that leadership and team climate influence recovery more than workload does. Karin Reinhold of Tallinn University of Technology took this into crisis conditions, where staff expect clarity and honesty rather than perfection, and where the trust that determines how teams cope is built long before the crisis arrives. Julia Mnich described work with the Polish State Fire Service that treats psychological resilience as a form of infrastructure, trained and maintained rather than assumed. Elena Bondar drew on evidence from organisations operating under sustained disruption in Ukraine, where most failures come not at the onset of a crisis but later, as exhaustion sets in.

For the BSR Mental Health Platform, the session was a direct contribution to one of its thematic areas. Mental health in working life is among the strands the platform is drawing together, and the discussion in Tallinn reinforced a point that runs through its work: prevention and support are organisational responsibilities rather than individual ones, and they need to be designed and practised over time rather than invoked when things go wrong.

Interest in the topic was strong enough that PA Health and PA Secure are taking it further. A joint workshop in Stockholm on 20 and 21 October 2026, by invitation, will bring together the health and civil protection perspectives on the psychological resilience of frontline and emergency personnel.

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