Egypt

The past year marked significant efforts by the Health Systems 20/20’s Workforce Planning activity team to finalize the Workforce Planning Tool (WPT). The WPT is an Access-based application developed to assist Egypt’s Ministry of Health (MOH) to estimate health facilities’ staffing gaps.

As part of efforts to support Egypt's Health Insurance Organization (HIO) to strengthen and reorganize its health care purchasing and payment functions, Health Systems 20/20 led financial management and cost accounting workshops with HIO's financial department.

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.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has recently engaged in a 30-year retrospective of Egypt's achievements in population, health and nutrition, including an assessment USAID's role in those accomplishments. As part of this process, an evaluation team met with representatives of the agency's Health Systems 20/20 project based in Cairo. Project staff accompanied the evaluators on a visit to Gharbia Governorate in late October 2009 to showcase the project’s recent achievements in the area of workforce planning.

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.