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Workforce Planning

Strengthening Egypt's Health Workforce

The Egyptian Ministry of Health (MOH) is working to strengthen its capacity to roll out and sustain health sector reforms. Minister of Health Dr. Prof. Hatem El-Gabaly has noted on several occasions that improvements in human resources for health are key strategic priorities for the nation.

Challenges facing the MOH include excess workforce capacity in some facilities, imbalances in the geographic and specialty distributions of health workers, and sub-optimal quality of the graduating workforce. Health Systems 20/20 is working with the MOH to address many of these challenges by implementing a workforce planning process and strengthening MOH capacity to manage the process.

Health Systems 20/20 is developing and piloting a computerized analytical tool – the Workforce Planning Tool (WPT) – that will enable the MOH to assess the need for and supply of health workers for primary health care and hospital facilities. The WPT uses patient volume data collected at the facility level, along with worker productivity standards developed by local experts, to compute the number of full-time workers required to serve a given patient workload. Current information on the supply of workers assigned to facilities is used to compute indicators of unmet need and/or surplus. Imbalances can be analyzed by specialty area (pediatrics, internal medicine, etc.) and type of worker (resident, specialist, nurse). The WPT is a user-friendly Microsoft Access application, and will be piloted in three governorates, Assuit, Gharbia, and Luxor.

To ensure continuity, buy-in, and accountability for this initiative, Health Systems 20/20 is conducting several skills-building and organizational capacity development activities related to workforce planning. MOH staff have been trained to collect workforce data from health facilities, enter the data into the WPT, and validate data consistency. Future trainings will build staff capacity to utilize the tool for analysis and ensure that MOH staff are able to conduct workforce planning over the long term.