21st January, 2011
As the Second Global Forum on Human Resources for Health gets underway in Bangkok, Thailand, AMREF is calling on world governments and development partners to move beyond mere discussions and to take concrete action to solve the global health worker crisis.
“We need to walk the talk by investing in human resources for health,” says Dr Peter Ngatia, AMREF’s Director for Capacity Building. “Walking the talk means investing in innovative methods of training and retaining health workers. Scaling up of production of human resources cannot happen unless we invest in the use of technology to train the numbers that are required. The 105 medical schools in Africa do not have the capacity to meet the urgent demand for doctors, nurses and midwives, among many other cadres of health workers. Yet until we have adequately trained numbers of health workers, the attainment of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) will remain an illusion.”
The theme of the forum, which runs from January 25-29, is ‘Reviewing progress, renewing commitments to health workers towards MDGs and beyond’. It follows up from the first global forum on HRH held in Kampala in March 2008.
AMREF is an international African organisation committed to improving African health. AMREF has been training health workers for close to 50 years, including clinical officers, community midwives and community health workers. AMREF’s current focus is on improving the health of women and children by concentrating on human resources for health; health leadership, governance and management; health management information systems; and strengthening of community systems.
AMREF believes that the following areas must be addressed in developing human resources for health:
- Increase in the number of health workers produced in Africa
- Increase in the number of health workers produced in developed countries to stem immigration of Africa’s health workforce
- Reduction of rural-urban migration of health workers
- Reduction of movement of health workers from public to private sectors
- Increase in the development of skills and competencies of the existing health workforce
- Task shifting, where specific tasks normally performed by highly skilled health workers are moved to health workers with shorter training and fewer qualifications eg from doctors to clinical officers.
These can only be achieved through:
- Use of innovative methods of training health workers, including doctors, clinical officers, nurses, midwives and community health workers e.g. application of ICT, eLearning , mLearning and telemedicine
- Increased investment in production of health workers
- Delivery of the 15% budgetary allocations pledged by African governments to improve the working conditions of health workers in rural areas and public health facilities
- Increased investment by global health initiatives in HRH development in Africa
For more information, please contact: Dr Peter Ngatia, Director of Capacity Building, Tel: +254 722712630; Email: peter.ngatia@amref.orgor Nzomo Mwita, Technical Specialist, Training, Tel: + 254 721440462; Email: nzomo.mwita@amref.org |
