08 Jun HRH2030: Celebrating Six Years of Building, Managing, and Optimizing Health Workforce
Alix Cho is a senior health practice associate in Chemonics’ Global Health Division, supporting the HRH2030 program.
Celebrating its legacy as USAID’s flagship health workforce program, HRH2030 convened a virtual event, “Six Years in 60 Minutes: Learning from the HRH2030 Program,” to share accomplishments and, via a discussion with expert panelists, place them in the context of ongoing challenges and opportunities in the building, managing, and optimizing of the health workforce.
Among the challenges: how to integrate community health workers, strengthen community health systems, and enhance service delivery at the community level; and how to address the deep digital divide that impacts health workers globally and hinders effective management and support. Among the opportunities: service delivery adaptions that have optimized the health workforce to enable the continued provision of HIV services during the COVID-19 pandemic. These and other accomplishments and challenges discussed during the event were looked at through the lens of the HRH2030 Health Worker Life Cycle, an illustrated approach that depicts how health workers move through the education sector and into the health labor market, used by HRH2030 to frame its programmatic activities. Below are some highlights and insights from the event, drawing from that same approach.
Building the health workforce through integration of community health workers
Community health workers are integral in delivering essential, quality health services in low- and middle-income countries. Yet, up to 61% of the global population will remain unable to access essential health services by 2030, if current health worker shortages are not addressed. Thus, professionalizing and institutionalizing community health workers as an integral part of a country’s health workforce and health system service delivery infrastructure will help to address these shortages, expand and strengthen the continuum of service delivery into communities, and advance progress towards achieving universal health coverage (UHC).
Event speaker Dr. Francis Omaswa, executive director of the African Center for Global Health and Social Transformation (ACHEST), stated that strengthening national leadership for health workforce and multi-sectoral coordination are keys to helping to build the health workforce.
“While we focus on community health workers, we do not focus enough on community health systems, which takes me now to the question of how do we build these community health workers?” Dr. Omaswa asked. “And, linking them is really about embedding the community health system into the national health system, so that it is an integral part of the health system.”
In Mali, HRH2030 used a community strengthening approach to work with women’s groups, bridging the gap between communities and facilities, improving health provider engagement locally, and increasing the rate of health facilities usage from 38 percent to 73 percent over a two-year period, reaching more than two million Malians in rural communities. In this clip below, showcasing some of HRH2030’s successes in building the health workforce, Dr. Houleyemata Diarra, who led the HRH2030 activity in Mali, talks about how the program contributed to strengthening care at the community level.
Managing and supporting health workers through equitable, measurable learning
More than ever, health workers need training anytime, anywhere, and e-learning is a cost-effective, sustainable solution to meet these needs. While the recent acceleration of digital learning is promising, said Dr. Tana Wuliji, Technical Officer of WHO and lead for the WHO Academy, she underscored the digital divide that currently limits training opportunities for many health workers.
“Of the 90 million health workers that are digitally accessible, only three percent of these health workers are in low-income countries. We have a long way to go,” Dr. Wuliji said. “While it’s very encouraging that we’ve got great initiatives in every part of the world, these solutions are not reaching everybody.”
In the Philippines, however, the digital divide is being closed, thanks to USAID Philippines and the HRH2030 program, which helped to support the creation of the Department of Health’s DOH Academy, which has provided accessible and cost-saving professional development for more than 5,000 health workers since its launch in October 2019. Accessibility to the DOH Academy was essential during the COVID-19 pandemic, and last year the DOH created an additional eight courses specifically related to the pandemic, so health workers could have timely information on infection prevention and control.
More about the DOH Academy, an initiative led by HRH2030 program partner, the American International Health Alliance, as well as other HRH2030 activities to support managing the health workforce are shown in this video, below.
Optimizing the health workforce using lessons from HIV/AIDS service delivery
While the need for more health workers has been clearly documented, this shortage won’t be overcome in the short-term, and many countries don’t have the resources to increase the workforce. When hiring more health workers isn’t an option, increasing the performance and productivity of existing health workers – “optimizing” health workers – is critical. Over the past six years, HRH2030 has advanced approaches to guide the use of data for decision-making on staffing, such as the HRH Optimization Tool for Antiretroviral Therapy (HOT4ART) and the HRH Optimization tool for Family Planning (HOT4FP), and partnered with the Touch Foundation to apply its Prioritization and Optimization Analysis to help governments and health facilities ensure they were deploying and distributing service providers for HIV services where they were most needed.
Panelist Diana Frymus of USAID’s Bureau of Global Health, Office of HIV/AIDS, elaborated on five lessons the global health community can learn from adaptation of HIV/AIDS service delivery modalities during COVID-19 pandemic, touching on the ability to quickly reconfigure and repurpose staff roles; use team-based approaches to increase task sharing; safeguard health workers’ health through attention to the work environment and risk profiling; enhance capacity to quickly mobilize efforts to expand learning to build skills and equip health workers; and focus attention on health workers’ mental health and wellness. Here are her comments in full, in the video clip below:
Additional insights about efforts to optimize existing health worker were provided by Dr. Grace Namaganda, country director for the HRH2030 Malawi activity, who shared about using the HOT4ART tool to effectively distribute existing health workers for HIV and AIDS service delivery; and by Sara Stratton, a senior technical advisor for Palladium, an HRH2030 consortium partner, who highlighted the value of task sharing among health workers. See their comments in this video, below.
With the anticipated world shortage of 18 million health workers by 2030, further exacerbated by the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is critical to ensure that countries have a well-trained and well-equipped health workforce to improve health outcomes. Over the past six years, HRH2030 has worked with partners to help more than 30 low- and middle-income countries support workforce development and assist governments in developing a sustainable approach to continued investments in health workers. Celebrate these achievements along with HRH2030 and watch the recording of the May 17 event, which includes the complete discussion among the panelists on building, managing, and optimizing health workforce.
Don’t miss the third and final event of the HRH2030 End of Program Legacy Series. Registration is now open for The Health Workforce of the Future, taking place on June 24.
Photo caption, from left to right: Dr. Elsie Kiguli-Malwadde, ACHEST; Rachel Deussom, HRH2030, Chemonics; Dr. Matar Camara, HRH2030 Senegal, Chemonics; Taufiq Sitompul, HRH2030 Indonesia, Chemonics; Leah McManus, HRH2030 Indonesia, Chemonics; Eckhard Kleinau, HRH2030, URC; Massimiliano Pezzoli, Touch Foundation; Palesa Pitso, Open Development; Diana Frymus, USAID Bureau of Global Health, Office of HIV/AIDS; Dr. Francis Omaswa; Wanda Jaskiewicz, HRH2030, Chemonics; Dr. Tana Wuliji, WHO.