Ensuring Adequate Human Resources for Health in Egypt
Jul 21 2009
One of the key challenges facing the Egyptian Ministry of Health (MOH) in its reform efforts is ensuring that the country has the right human capacities and workforce in place to roll out and sustain reforms. On several occasions, the Minister of Health has iterated that improvements in human capacity are key strategic priorities. Challenges facing the MOH in its efforts to manage its workforce include: excess workforce capacity; imbalances in the geographic and specialty distributions of health workers; and sub-optimal quality of graduating workforce and MOH staff.
Health Systems 20/20 is working with the MOH to address these challenges through the development of a long-term MOH workforce plan, implementation of a workforce planning process, and the strengthening of MOH capacity to manage the implementation process.
In its efforts to establish a sustainable workforce planning program, Health Systems 20/20 is reviewing MOH governorate-level data, and national human resource strategy, procedures, and workforce standards. Using the data from the governorates, the project will develop and populate a forecasting model and associated software to identify gaps that exist between the current workforce composition, workforce competency, and the demand for future staffing to accomplish MOH objectives. Once this workforce analysis is completed, a strategic plan to close the gap between future workforce supply and demand will be developed. The project conducted several skill-development and capacity-building activities in targeted governorates to insure that MOH staff is able to conduct a robust workforce planning exercise in the future and integrate developed workforce strategic planning into the MOH system.
Health Systems 20/20 conducted ten capacity-building workshops in Gharbia governorate from April 26-May 2, 2009 and trained 141 participants. Trainees included directors of health facilities, statisticians from health units and centers, and information specialists from the Gharbia Information Center, the MOH entity responsible for managing and updating governorate information related to the health sector. Participants were trained on the data entry tool which will be used to enter collected data, validate the data, and produce analysis reports.
Following the workshops on May 13, Health Systems 20/20 organized two hands-on training sessions in a computer lab in Gharbia for 28 participants. The training sessions provided hands-on-experience for participants on electronic data entry and the analysis tool. The MOH task force team, assigned by the MOH to oversee the workforce planning initiative, took the lead as trainers during the workshops. To ensure continuity, buy-in, and accountability for this initiative, Health Systems 20/20 assisted in setting criteria for selecting task force members and is building their capabilities for conducting workforce planning over the long term. Health Systems 20/20 also identified talented participants from the Gharbia Information Center Team and encouraged their participation as trainers during the workshop. The Gharbia team, with the guidance and close follow-up by the MOH task force, is now responsible for managing and processing workforce data.
Next steps will focus on institutionalizing sound data collection and processing mechanisms to link the data collected on the governorate level with data available at the central level to contribute to ensuring adequate human resources for health to deliver priority health services.
