Reducing inefficiencies in the labour market for health personnel in Togo

News

11 February 2015. One of the respondent groups for the labour market study: a class of final year midwifery students at the Ecole Nationale des Sages-Femmes de Lomé. Picture by Natalie Vinkeles Melchers, KIT.

11 February 2015. One of the respondent groups for the labour market study: a class of final year midwifery students at the Ecole Nationale des Sages-Femmes de Lomé. Picture by Natalie Vinkeles Melchers, KIT.

From 7-13 February, KIT advisors Christel Jansen and Natalie Vinkeles Melchers worked in Togo with the Ministry of Health, the WHO and the team of researchers from the University of Lomé to launch a health labour market study that will take place in the coming months.

Match making in health

In Togo, the Ministry of Health is currently enhancing the planning around the training, recruitment and deployment of its health personnel, with the aim to ensure a better match between the supply of health personnel and the needs of the health system in the country. This is needed, as at the moment, the situation is characterized by:

  1. Insufficient public financial resources to hire sufficient health personnel to meet the population needs.
  2. An irregular and unpredictable recruitment of health workers for the public sector, which is responsible for the largest share of health service delivery in Togo.
  3. The number of trained health professionals largely exceeding the recruitment and deployment capacity of the public health sector, resulting in newly graduates facing difficulties to find stable employment in the health sector.
  4. A distribution of health workers throughout the country that is not in line with the needs of the population; an oversupply of staff exists in urban areas, and workplaces in more remote and hard-to-reach areas are being considered as punitive posts.

Removing bottlenecks and reducing inefficiencies

In order to guide the Government’s efforts to improve the coverage of health personnel in the coming years, the Ministry of Health commissioned KIT to undertake a labour market study. This study is undertaken with the technical and financial support from WHO within the framework of the French Muskoka Fund and in collaboration with the University of Lomé (Unité de Recherche Démographique). The first results are expected in May 2015.

The study will highlight and quantify exactly where the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the labour market can be found, in order to provide recommendations on what should be done to remove these bottlenecks and reduce these inefficiencies. The study will respond to questions like:

  • Where do graduates from health training institutes go after their studies?
  • What can be done to enhance alignment between the training of health personnel and the number of posts available in the sector?
  • What can be done to enhance deployment of health personnel in the areas where they are needed the most?
  • How to optimize efficiency of the chain of training – recruiting – deploying health personnel in such a way that ‘waste’ in terms of time, money and health personnel likely to work in the remote areas are reduced to a minimum?

The launch of the study included briefing sessions to collect inputs from stakeholders and a one-week workshop with the project team (Ministry, WHO, KIT, University of Lomé) to finalize and validate the design of the study and to prepare the data collection that will take place in the coming weeks.

More about KIT’s work on Human Resources for Health