Colombia can expand policies for healthy aging, home support and community care, but every new service eventually encounters the same practical question: who will provide the care? An older person recovering from a fall may need rehabilitation, help with bathing and meals, medication support, transport and somebody able to notice when their condition changes. Those functions do not belong to one profession, one institution or even one formal workforce.
This makes workforce development one of the defining issues for Colombia’s emerging long-term care system. The Colombia Aging, Long-Term Care & Community Support Knowledge Hub examines a system in which health professionals, gerontologists, paid caregivers, community organizations, older-person services and families all contribute to support. The challenge is increasingly to turn that mixture into reliable capacity without assuming that relatives—particularly women—will absorb whatever formal services cannot provide.
Two recent policy developments make the workforce question particularly timely. Colombia adopted its Política Pública del Talento Humano en Salud 2025–2035 through Resolución 1444 de 2025, with objectives including stronger workforce availability, more equitable distribution, appropriate training and dignified employment conditions. Then, on July 28, 2026, Ley 2612 de 2026 regulated the profession of gerontology and defined an unusually broad field of practice spanning healthy aging, territorial policy, older-person services, institutional leadership, community models and technical support.
Neither development creates a complete long-term care workforce by itself. Together, however, they signal an important transition: aging is becoming a workforce-planning issue requiring specialist knowledge, multidisciplinary practice and stronger professional infrastructure rather than an expectation that existing health services and families will somehow absorb rising need.
There is no single Colombian long-term care profession
Long-term care is inherently multidisciplinary. A person living with increasing dependency may encounter a physician, nurse, therapist, gerontologist, psychologist, social worker, nutrition professional, home-support worker, community organization and unpaid family caregiver. Some needs are clinical; others concern personal assistance, mobility, social participation, nutrition, housing, cognition or everyday routines.
The distinction matters because a health workforce and a long-term care workforce are not identical.
Colombia’s Sistema General de Seguridad Social en Salud organizes health services through its established health-sector institutions and workforce. But much of the daily assistance associated with long-term dependency occurs outside episodic medical treatment. Centros Vida, Centros Día, residential institutions, home and community programs, families and other social-support arrangements can all contribute.
A sustainable workforce strategy therefore has to answer more than how many doctors or nurses the country requires. It needs to understand the functions older people need and determine the appropriate combination of professional, technical, practical and informal support.
This is fundamentally a workforce, care-team and skill-mix question. Using highly qualified clinicians for tasks that do not require clinical expertise can waste scarce capacity. Leaving complex health or safeguarding responsibilities to inadequately supported caregivers creates the opposite risk.
The stronger model places each function with a person who has the competence, authority and support to perform it safely while ensuring that the older person experiences one coherent pathway rather than a succession of disconnected workers.
Gerontology now has a stronger statutory position
Ley 2612 de 2026 is an important development because it formally regulates the profession of gerontology in Colombia and defines gerontology as addressing human aging at both individual and population levels across biological, psychological, sociological, environmental and other dimensions.
The law emphasizes healthy aging, functional capacity, autonomy and independence. Its field of action reaches well beyond direct individual intervention.
Gerontologists may work within health service institutions, benefit-plan organizations, family compensation funds and basic or complementary health teams. They may support departmental and municipal health secretariats, contribute to inspection and surveillance involving older-person institutions, provide technical assistance to territorial entities, develop policies and programs, work in education and research, direct gerontological and geriatric institutions, contribute to end-of-life support and develop community and intercultural healthy-aging models.
This breadth is significant. It positions gerontology not simply as another clinical specialty but as expertise connecting individual aging with population planning, community services and public policy.
The law also creates clearer professional controls. Colombian-qualified gerontologists require the relevant professional registration, while provisions address foreign qualifications, illegal professional practice, ethical responsibilities, a deontological structure and the development of a national register.
Professionalization can strengthen quality by clarifying what expertise means and who may legitimately claim it. But regulation is only useful if it translates into sufficient professional capacity, appropriate roles and effective multidisciplinary working.
Creating a regulated profession does not mean that every older person needs a gerontologist involved in every interaction. Its stronger contribution may be ensuring that aging expertise influences how services, teams and territorial systems are designed.
From professional title to operational capability
A workforce system can regulate titles without necessarily improving frontline capability. Colombia’s next challenge is therefore implementation.
Ley 2612 requires the profession of gerontology to be incorporated into relevant public-sector employment frameworks and establishes roles across health, territorial government and older-person services. It also gives particular attention to technical support for Centros de Bienestar, protection and long-stay centers, Centros Vida and Centros Día.
For territorial authorities, this creates practical workforce questions. Where should gerontological expertise sit? Which functions require continuous local capacity and which can be shared? How should gerontologists work alongside health professionals, social-support teams and service managers? What information should their involvement generate for local planning?
Professionalization should produce observable improvements rather than additional organizational layers.
Those improvements might include stronger functional assessment, better prevention of avoidable decline, earlier recognition of changing needs, more person-centered service design, stronger technical oversight of older-person services and better use of population evidence.
The same principle applies across the wider workforce. Competency frameworks are most valuable when they define what workers must actually be able to do rather than simply listing training courses completed.
For example, a worker supporting an older person with mobility difficulties may need to recognize deterioration, understand safe assistance, promote independence rather than unnecessary dependency, communicate concerns and know when clinical input is required. Those capabilities cannot be demonstrated solely through attendance at induction.
Scenario: a Centro Vida redesigns its workforce around function
A municipality operates a Centro Vida serving older people with widely differing levels of independence. Its historical staffing model has developed incrementally: activities, meals and social support are well established, but staff increasingly encounter people with mobility decline, cognitive changes, multiple chronic conditions and greater family-caregiver pressure.
The municipality could respond by treating every increase in complexity as a reason to medicalize the service. Instead, it reviews the functions the center now needs.
A gerontologist helps examine patterns of functional decline, participation and service use. Rehabilitation expertise is linked more systematically where mobility is changing. Frontline staff receive clearer competencies for recognizing deterioration without being expected to diagnose it. Referral routes to health services are strengthened. Families are included where appropriate, but their availability is documented rather than assumed.
The service also reviews whether its activities genuinely maintain functional ability. A program may be popular without improving mobility, confidence or social participation. Conversely, a simple routine involving movement, nutrition, purposeful activity and peer connection may contribute significantly to independence.
The workforce model becomes less about accumulating professional titles and more about aligning skills with outcomes.
For the municipality, the governance evidence changes too. Staffing reports no longer show only vacancies and attendance. They begin to demonstrate workforce capability, changing population need, referral patterns and whether the Centro Vida is contributing to healthier aging.
Colombia’s health workforce policy matters to long-term care
The Política Pública del Talento Humano en Salud 2025–2035 provides a broader workforce context. Adopted through Resolución 1444 de 2025, it seeks to strengthen Colombia’s health workforce through training, professional development, equitable availability and dignified working conditions.
Long-term care cannot be separated from these objectives because older people with dependency often rely heavily on the health system. Multimorbidity, medication management, rehabilitation, dementia, palliative needs and episodes of acute deterioration all create interfaces with health professionals.
Geographic distribution is particularly important. A national headcount can appear adequate while specific territories have limited access to the skills their populations require. Workforce planning therefore needs to combine population numbers with age structure, disease burden, functional need, travel time and service configuration.
This connects with workforce data and capacity planning. Counting professionals is necessary, but it does not reveal whether people can reach them, whether their skills match local need or whether their time is being used effectively.
For an aging society, workforce intelligence should increasingly connect health labor data with information about older-person services and household care capacity. Otherwise, each part of the system can appear adequately staffed while the person needing support experiences substantial gaps between them.
The practical care workforce needs its own development pathway
Professional regulation is only one part of workforce development. Much long-term support consists of sustained practical assistance: personal care, meals, mobility, companionship, supervision, household routines and help maintaining participation in community life.
These functions require skill even when they do not require a university-level profession.
The policy risk is a workforce hierarchy in which clinical and professional roles receive formal recognition while practical caregiving remains poorly defined, inconsistently trained or dependent on informal arrangements. That would leave the largest part of everyday care outside the strongest workforce-development mechanisms.
Colombia’s National Care Policy is relevant because it addresses both people who require care and those who provide it, including paid and unpaid caregivers. CONPES 4143 also identifies dignified conditions for care as part of the transformation it seeks to achieve. Its action plan includes measures relating to the rights of the remunerated care sector as well as wider recognition, reduction and redistribution of care work.
The long-term opportunity is to create clearer progression between practical support, specialist competence, supervision and professional roles without implying that every caregiver must become a health professional.
A mature workforce architecture might distinguish core capabilities required across care settings from additional competencies for dementia, complex mobility, end-of-life support, behavioral distress or other needs. It would also make supervision explicit.
This matters because training without supervision can leave workers technically informed but operationally unsupported. Competence develops through education, observation, practice, feedback and access to advice when circumstances change.
Organizations developing similar workforce systems can use the Quality Improvement Action Plan Builder to structure improvement where recurring workforce or service-quality gaps have been identified. It is not a Colombian regulatory tool, but the underlying improvement discipline—moving from identified weakness to accountable action, evidence and review—is applicable across care systems.
Decent work is a quality issue, not only an employment issue
A long-term care system cannot sustainably improve the dignity of people receiving care while treating the people delivering it as an expendable labor input.
Employment quality affects service quality directly. Unstable work can increase turnover. Poorly organized schedules can fragment relationships. Inadequate supervision can leave workers isolated with difficult decisions. Weak progression can encourage experienced staff to leave the sector just as their practical knowledge becomes most valuable.
For home-based care, employment design has additional complexity. Travel between households consumes time. Rural distances can be substantial. Workers may encounter safety issues or emotionally demanding situations without colleagues immediately available. A schedule that counts only direct contact time can underestimate the resources required to provide reliable care.
Decent work therefore connects pay and contractual conditions with:
- predictable and realistic workloads;
- paid time for essential travel, documentation and coordination where applicable;
- access to supervision and escalation;
- training matched to actual responsibilities;
- protection from violence, harassment and unsafe working conditions; and
- credible opportunities for professional or career development.
These are not merely workforce benefits. They influence continuity, safeguarding, responsiveness and the likelihood that experienced workers remain available.
The relationship is particularly important in a feminized care economy. Moving work from an unpaid woman in a household to a poorly protected paid woman does not complete the redistribution envisioned by care reform. Formalization needs to improve both visibility and working conditions.
Scenario: home support expands faster than workforce infrastructure
A territorial authority decides to strengthen home and community support for vulnerable older people, consistent with the broader direction reinforced by Ley 2581 de 2026. Demand is strong, and expanding support at home appears preferable to waiting until people require institutional care.
Initial growth is encouraging. But within months, operational problems become visible. Workers spend significant time traveling between dispersed households. Some older people require more physical assistance than originally assessed. Families begin asking workers to undertake health-related tasks outside their defined competence. Staff turnover increases because schedules are unpredictable.
The authority could interpret this simply as a recruitment problem and contract additional workers. Instead, it examines the operating model.
Visits are geographically clustered where possible. Functional need is reassessed so that time allocation better reflects complexity. Workers receive clear guidance on which tasks fall within their role and how to escalate health concerns. Supervision is scheduled rather than left to informal contact. Training priorities are derived from actual incidents and recurring questions.
Workforce metrics are also widened. Vacancy rates remain important, but leaders now monitor continuity, missed or late visits, travel burden, supervision, turnover, changes in dependency and reasons for escalation.
The result is a more realistic understanding of capacity. Ten workers do not constitute the same usable workforce under every geographic, scheduling and skill configuration.
Rural and dispersed territories require different workforce economics
Colombia’s geography makes workforce distribution a structural challenge. A service model designed around dense urban populations cannot simply be extended into rural and dispersed territories by reducing the number of available staff.
Ley 2612 explicitly recognizes this issue. In insular, dispersed rural and hard-to-access territories, it directs territorial entities to prioritize the involvement of gerontologists in primary care programs, Centros Vida, Centros Día and home programs.
The provision is significant because it recognizes that geographic inequality requires active workforce design. But professional availability is only one element.
Rural models may require workers with broader capabilities, stronger links to primary care, outreach, tele-support and more flexible community infrastructure. Travel time becomes a material capacity constraint. Small populations may make dedicated specialist posts difficult to sustain locally, increasing the value of regional or remote expertise.
Telegerontology, specifically recognized in Ley 2612 in relation to technical accompaniment, could extend professional reach. Yet digital support depends on connectivity, equipment, local capability and clear accountability for decisions made remotely.
This illustrates why rural and underserved communities require more than proportional allocation. Equal staffing ratios can produce unequal access when workers spend significantly more time traveling and specialist services are concentrated elsewhere.
Territorial workforce planning should therefore consider effective capacity: how much professional and practical support actually reaches people after geography, travel and service organization are taken into account.
Technology should extend human capability rather than disguise shortages
Digital systems can make Colombia’s long-term care workforce more effective. Remote professional consultation can extend specialist reach. Shared records can reduce duplicated assessment. Scheduling technology can improve deployment. Telehealth can prevent unnecessary travel, and digital learning can make continuing development accessible to workers outside major cities.
Artificial intelligence may eventually support administrative work, pattern recognition, documentation or workforce forecasting. These uses remain subject to questions of data quality, privacy, transparency and professional accountability.
The central workforce principle is that technology should be evaluated against the task it changes.
If an electronic record saves ten minutes of duplicated documentation, it may release staff time for care. If a new system requires workers to enter the same information repeatedly into incompatible platforms, digitization can reduce rather than increase capacity.
Remote monitoring may help identify deterioration but creates responsibility for reviewing alerts and responding. Teleconsultation can extend specialist expertise but still requires somebody locally to implement recommendations.
The Digital Transformation, AI and Cybersecurity Readiness Assessment can help organizations examining comparable modernization programs structure questions about workforce readiness, governance and implementation risk. It does not determine Colombian compliance, but it reinforces the need to treat digital change as workforce redesign rather than software installation.
This distinction is central to technology-enabled care: the strongest technologies increase the reach, reliability or judgment of human teams rather than creating an assumption that fewer people can automatically manage greater need.
Unpaid caregivers remain part of the workforce reality
No analysis of Colombia’s long-term care workforce is credible if it counts only paid workers.
Families provide a substantial share of everyday care, and women undertake a disproportionate amount of unpaid domestic and care work. These caregivers may perform personal assistance, medication-related tasks, mobility support, appointment coordination and continuous supervision.
They are not employees of the long-term care system, and describing them simply as a workforce risks turning family relationships into labor categories. Yet workforce planning that ignores their contribution can dramatically underestimate the amount of support being delivered.
The stronger distinction is between recognizing capacity and assuming availability.
A daughter who currently provides 30 hours of support each week represents real care capacity, but the system should not automatically plan on her providing 30 hours indefinitely. Her employment may change. Her health may deteriorate. She may move. The older person’s needs may increase beyond what she can safely provide.
This makes caregiver support and family burden a workforce-sustainability issue as well as a rights issue.
Assessment should therefore consider what relatives are willing and able to do, which tasks require training or professional support, and what contingency exists if family capacity changes.
Scenario: a family caregiver is performing increasingly clinical work
An older woman in Bogotá lives with heart failure, diabetes and reduced mobility. Her adult son organizes appointments and meals, while her daughter provides most daily assistance.
Following several changes in medication and a period of deterioration, the daughter gradually becomes responsible for a much more complex routine. She monitors symptoms, organizes multiple medicines, helps with mobility and decides when a change appears serious enough to contact health services.
No single professional has explicitly delegated all of these responsibilities. They have accumulated around her because she is present.
A better pathway begins by mapping what she is actually doing. Some tasks remain reasonable family support. Others require clearer professional instruction or review. Medication information is reconciled. Warning signs and escalation routes are explained. Functional assessment identifies equipment and rehabilitation that can reduce physical assistance. The family discusses what support remains sustainable.
The objective is not to exclude the daughter from care. Her knowledge of her mother is valuable. It is to prevent proximity from becoming a substitute for competence and professional responsibility.
If similar cases recur across a service or territory, the issue becomes a workforce signal. Repeated transfer of complex tasks to families may indicate gaps in home support, clinical coordination or education that should be visible at system level.
Continuity should be treated as a workforce outcome
Workforce planning often concentrates on whether enough staff are available to complete required activity. Long-term care adds another dimension: whether the same people can build and sustain relationships over time.
Continuity matters because care is relational. A worker who knows an older person can recognize subtle changes in mobility, appetite, mood or cognition. Familiarity can reduce anxiety for someone living with dementia. Trust can make conversations about abuse, neglect or caregiver exhaustion more likely to occur.
High turnover therefore creates costs that are not captured simply by replacing a vacant post. Knowledge has to be rebuilt. Families repeat information. New workers require orientation. Early signs of deterioration can be missed because nobody has a reliable baseline against which to compare them.
This is why retention, burnout and moral injury should be understood in relation to care quality rather than treated only as human-resources concerns.
Continuity does not require one worker to become indispensable. That can create its own risks. Strong services combine relational continuity with team resilience: information is shared appropriately, backup arrangements exist and no single worker carries knowledge that disappears when they are absent.
The same balance applies to family caregivers. Supporting continuity should not create dependency on one daughter, spouse or sibling whose absence would destabilize the entire arrangement.
Workforce assurance needs evidence beyond training completion
As Colombia develops more formal care infrastructure, leaders will need stronger ways of demonstrating whether workforce capability matches the needs of people receiving support.
Training records provide one form of evidence, but they are incomplete. A worker may have attended a course without being able to apply the learning. Conversely, an experienced worker may have considerable practical competence that has never been formally recognized.
Workforce assurance should connect several forms of evidence: qualifications and registration where legally required, role-specific competencies, supervision, observed practice, service outcomes, incidents, complaints, continuity and feedback from older people and families.
This creates a learning loop. If falls repeatedly occur during transfers, the response should not automatically be another generic training session. Leaders should examine equipment, staffing, assessment quality, environment, scheduling and whether workers are being asked to support people whose needs exceed the service model.
Organizations seeking to structure this type of evidence can use the Quality Dashboard Builder to connect workforce indicators with service quality and outcomes. The tool is not an official Colombian assurance mechanism, but the underlying approach is valuable: workforce data becomes more useful when leaders can see how capacity, competence and continuity relate to what happens to people.
This supports a wider workforce assurance and audit approach in which learning is based on practice rather than administrative compliance alone.
Career pathways can connect recruitment with retention
Long-term care will struggle to compete for workers if employment is perceived as a low-status destination with limited progression.
Professionalization does not mean turning every role into a profession. It means making skill visible and creating credible routes through which people can develop.
A practical caregiver might build expertise in dementia support, mobility, palliative care or community rehabilitation. An experienced worker might progress into supervision, coordination or training. Other workers may pursue technical or university education and enter professional roles.
Gerontology can contribute to this architecture because its multidisciplinary perspective connects aging science with service design and functional ability. But it should complement rather than displace the practical expertise of workers who provide everyday support.
Clearer pathways can produce several benefits. Recruitment becomes easier when applicants can see a future in the sector. Retention can improve because experience is rewarded. Providers can deploy workers according to competence rather than job title alone. Older people benefit from teams whose expertise develops as needs become more complex.
The principle aligns with professional development and career pathways, but Colombia’s implementation will need to reflect its own educational institutions, labor market and regulatory framework.
The aim should be permeability without unsafe substitution: workers should be able to develop and progress, while regulated clinical or professional functions remain within appropriate scope of practice.
Workforce planning must connect national ambition with territorial reality
National policy can establish direction, professional standards and workforce priorities. Care, however, is ultimately delivered somewhere specific.
Municipalities and departments differ in population aging, fiscal capacity, service infrastructure, geography and access to professionals. Major cities can sustain specialist teams that would be unrealistic in a small rural municipality. Some territories have stronger community organizations or older-person services than others.
This means Colombia needs a workforce architecture capable of variation without accepting inequity as inevitable.
National institutions can strengthen standards, education, professional regulation, data and strategic direction. Territorial authorities can map local need, organize services, identify workforce gaps and determine where shared or outreach models are required. Providers control many day-to-day issues affecting deployment, supervision and continuity. Educational institutions influence whether the future workforce has the skills the care system actually needs.
Good governance connects these layers.
If municipalities repeatedly report inability to recruit particular expertise, that should inform education and workforce policy. If training programs produce graduates concentrated in areas with lower unmet need, distribution becomes a policy issue. If workers leave particular services because employment conditions are consistently poor, procurement or funding arrangements may need examination rather than treating turnover as an isolated provider problem.
The Governance Maturity Assessment can help organizations in other contexts test whether workforce risks have clear ownership, evidence and escalation routes. In Colombia, the specific governance actors differ, but the principle remains: persistent workforce variation needs a route from local experience into higher-level decisions.
A workforce strategy should begin with the outcomes Colombia wants
It is tempting to reduce workforce strategy to projections: calculate the number of older people, estimate staffing ratios and determine how many workers will be required.
That is necessary but insufficient because workforce demand depends partly on the care model Colombia chooses to build.
A system focused primarily on responding after dependency becomes severe will require a different workforce from one investing substantially in prevention, rehabilitation and community support. A system relying heavily on institutions will organize labor differently from one expanding support at home. A model that assumes family availability will appear to require fewer paid workers than one that explicitly protects caregivers from excessive burden.
Workforce planning is therefore inseparable from service design.
If the strategic goal is healthy aging with greater autonomy and independence, the workforce needs capabilities that maintain function rather than merely complete tasks for people. Rehabilitation, gerontology, primary care, practical support and community participation all become important.
If the goal is stronger aging in place, home-based capacity, mobile expertise and travel-efficient deployment become more important. If Colombia intends the National Care Policy to redistribute care, formal workforce growth becomes one of the mechanisms through which redistribution can occur.
The stronger planning question is not simply “How many care workers will Colombia need?” It is “What combination of people, competencies and service models will enable older people to live in the ways national policy is trying to support?”
What other countries can learn from Colombia’s workforce direction
Colombia’s workforce arrangements remain in development, and it would be premature to present them as a completed long-term care labor model. That incompleteness is itself instructive.
The regulation of gerontology in 2026 shows how a country can give aging expertise a role extending across individual care, territorial planning, institutional oversight, policy and community development. The health workforce policy simultaneously emphasizes availability, distribution, development and dignified conditions. The National Care Policy places paid and unpaid caregiving within a wider framework of rights and co-responsibility.
Together, these developments point toward a broader conception of workforce capacity.
The transferable lesson is not that every country should create the same professional structure. Some systems rely more heavily on geriatric medicine, nursing, social work or dedicated care occupations. Institutional histories differ substantially.
The more useful principle is that aging expertise, practical caregiving, health competence and community knowledge need to be deliberately connected.
Another lesson concerns geography. National workforce totals can conceal serious access problems. Colombia’s explicit attention to rural, dispersed and hard-to-access territories highlights the importance of measuring where skills are available, not merely whether they exist nationally.
Finally, professionalization should be assessed through outcomes. New titles, registers and qualifications matter, but their ultimate value lies in whether older people experience safer care, greater independence, better continuity and more equitable access.
The next workforce frontier is integration
Colombia does not need one occupational group to become responsible for every dimension of long-term care. It needs stronger integration between the people who already contribute and the new capacity that demographic change will require.
That means defining interfaces between health professionals and community services, between gerontologists and practical caregivers, between formal workers and families, and between territorial services and national workforce policy.
It also means treating information as part of workforce infrastructure. A skilled worker cannot act effectively if they do not know that an older person was recently hospitalized, that medication has changed or that a caregiver can no longer continue providing support.
Similarly, a multidisciplinary team is not integrated merely because several professions appear on an organizational chart. Integration requires shared goals, usable information, clear responsibilities and routes for escalation.
As Colombia develops its care architecture, this creates an opportunity to avoid designing separate workforce silos around each program. The stronger model is one in which competencies can connect around the older person while professional boundaries remain sufficiently clear to protect safety and accountability.
Conclusion
Colombia’s long-term care workforce is emerging from several systems at once: the established health workforce, newly strengthened gerontology profession, older-person services, community organizations, practical paid care and the enormous contribution of families. The country’s central challenge is not simply to increase the number of people involved in care. It is to turn those different sources of capacity into a workforce that is skilled, sustainable, appropriately distributed and capable of supporting autonomy as people age.
Ley 2612 de 2026 gives gerontology a stronger professional and territorial role at an important moment. The Política Pública del Talento Humano en Salud 2025–2035 places workforce availability, equitable distribution, development and dignified conditions within a longer national horizon. CONPES 4143 adds another essential dimension by recognizing that care must be redistributed rather than indefinitely absorbed by unpaid caregivers.
Implementation will determine whether these developments reinforce one another. Colombia will need career pathways for practical care as well as professional expertise, stronger rural workforce models, meaningful supervision, technology that releases rather than consumes human capacity, and evidence connecting workforce decisions with continuity, functional ability and quality of life.
An aging society ultimately needs more than workers. It needs people with the right skills, in the right places, working under conditions that allow them to build expertise and relationships. If Colombia can align professionalization with decent work and person-centered service design, workforce development can become one of the foundations on which a more sustainable long-term care system is built.