Govt vows to narrow gaps in provision of health staff

HILDA MHAGAMA

DESPITE tremendous progress made in the health sector across the country, there are still gaps within its workforce, a situation that results in poor patient care and unnecessary loss of lives.

Tanzania currently needs an estimated 178,290 health personnel, compared to the existing workforce of 90,791, or 51 per cent of demand.

This was said in Dar es Salaam yesterday by the Director for Training and Human Resources Development at the Ministry of Health, Community Development, Gender, Elderly and Children, Dr Otilia Gowelle, during a two-day health partnership symposium organised by Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET).

“We have made progress in preparing health experts but there are still challenges in increasing their number … much effort has gone in preparing only one type of expert thus creating a gap,” she noted.

Dr Gowelle also said construction of health facilities should go hand in hand with the training of experts, in areas like psychiatry and surgery – for which there were only a few universities with capacity to train them, so their demand rises each day.

On reducing maternal deaths, she said the plan was to raise the regional facilities so that each of them could conduct operations; yet scarcity of these experts still remains among the most challenging of our problems.

THET has been supporting health workers around the world since 1989, improving patient care through targeted training programmes.

“We work with a diverse range of partners to build a world where everybody has access to affordable and quality healthcare in the past six years alone, we have reached over 50,000 health workers across thirty-four countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia,” says THET Chief Executive, Mr Ben Simms. Mr Simms further said one-in-seven people around the world will never see a qualified health worker in their lives.

For the communities that do, often they are faced with an under staffed, poorly resourced and inadequately trained workforce. “Health Partnerships are a model for improving health and health services based on ideas of co development between actors and institutions from different countries.

The partnerships are long-term but not permanent and are based on ideas of reciprocal learning and mutual benefits,” he noted.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates the world will need to recruit and train an additional 13 million health workers in the decades to come. Without such a workforce no country will be able to meet their citizens’ right to health.