Planning ahead for health personnel

As part of provinces’ quest to put their scarce health resources to the best use, provincial health management recently held a workshop with the World Health Organisation (WHO) to plan what personnel they will need in future

As part of provinces’ quest to put their scarce health resources to the best use, provincial health management recently held a workshop with the World Health Organisation (WHO) to plan what personnel they will need in future.

Dr Thomas Hall, a WHO representative and world expert on health care systems, showed senior provincial health managers how to plan how many health care personnel they would need in years to come ‘€“ on the computer.

Hall was a guest of the Department of Community Health at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

“I have been working with WHO to improve methods to establish size and composition of the workforce needed in future years,” said Hall, who has worked in 40 countries.

He said this crucial information was used to advise medical schools and nursing colleges on how many people to train.

Hall has helped to develop a computer model so countries can put in data and different scenarios for how they would like the health care sector to develop.

He said all over the world, health care systems operated in crisis. “What this model is trying to do is, in the longer term, get a better health system and improve the quality not quantity of care.” He said 10% of health depended on a good health system.
“Because it takes so many years to train a nurse or doctor, we have to plan ahead.”

In South Africa, only 1 100 doctors graduate each year from eight medical schools.
“One rule of thumb is a 10% change in the intake of medical students results in a 2% change in the supply of doctors,” he said. Participants made 15 to 20 year projections in the last two days of the workshop by putting in their own provincial data.

They worked on how to look ahead in terms of, for example, numbers and distribution of beds and clinics and a breakdown of the different staff needed in hospitals and clinics.
Hall said problems in the country included “maldistribution” of personnel, a tendency towards overspecialisation, and too many resources going into hospitals instead of more going to prevention programmes.
But Hall said he was positive about South Africa and said the country was, within a primary health care focus, “trying to reduce inequalities and give important emphasis to quality, all on a very thin budget.”

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