Meeting Health Workforce Needs in Luxor, Egypt
Dec 14 2009
The Egyptian Ministry of Health (MOH) is working to strengthen its capacity to roll out and sustain health sector reforms. Challenges faced 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.
To date, Health Systems 20/20 has conducted skills-development and capacity-building activities in two Egyptian governorates, Assuit and Gharbia, to ensure that MOH staff is able to conduct robust workforce planning exercises and integrate workforce strategic planning into the MOH’s reform efforts.
Currently, Health Systems 20/20 is extending workforce planning activities into Luxor governorate, which already collects some routine human resources data. The MOH requested that the project focus on Luxor because of this availability of data, and it presents an excellent opportunity to apply and test Health Systems 20/20’s newly-developed Workforce Planning Tool (WPT). The Luxor Directorate Information Center team and the MOH undersecretary in Luxor are enthusiastic collaborators in the process.
To jumpstart the work, two hospital-level trainings on the WPT were conducted on November 18 and 19 for 36 participants, including hospital directors and selected staff from the hospital information center and personnel department. Health Systems 20/20 introduced the WPT, a tool for collecting, entering, and validating workforce data and producing analytic workforce planning reports. Dr. Rufida Sultan, the Director of the Gharbia Information Center, spoke to the Luxor hospital trainees about her experience in Gharbia collecting workforce data using the WPT. She explained the importance of the team’s role in data collection, entry and verification.
Health Systems 20/20 also conducted three training sessions for 95 MOH primary health care center (PHC) staff in Luxor on collecting required staffing data. The training targeted representatives at the governorate level (heads of the PHC and human resources departments, the head of the Directorate Information Center, and selected staff from the personnel department), district level (two information specialists from each of the four districts), and facility level (PHC directors and statisticians or registrars from each of the 44 PHC centers in Luxor).
At both the PHC and hospital training sessions, representatives from the MOH’s central-level Human Resources Task Force, Dr. Dalia Ahmede and Ms. Jehan Saleh, took the lead and will keep tabs on the workforce activity in Luxor to promote sustainability and continuity of the activity. Members of the Luxor governorate workforce planning team also acted as trainers during the sessions, as part of Health Systems 20/20’s efforts to build local capacity.
When hospital and PHC data collection is complete, Health Systems 20/20 will work with the Luxor workforce planning team to develop and populate a forecasting model using associated software. The workforce assessment and projection model will serve to identify the gaps that exist between the current workforce composition and the demand for future staffing to accomplish MOH objectives.
Read about more recent developments on Health Systems 20/20's Workforce Planning Tool, as adopted by Egypt's Ministry of Health, here.
