Workshop on reduction of inefficiencies in labour market for health personnel in Togo
From 29 June – 2 July 2015, WHO Togo and HQ offices have organised a workshop to identify the package of interventions for the development of the HRH plan. The KIT advisors Christel Jansen and Natalie Vinkeles Melchers presented preliminary results of a health labour market analysis in Togo. The study was commissioned by the Ministry of Health and the World Health Organisation, and executed in collaboration with a team of researchers from the University of Lomé, Unité de Recherche Démographique (URD). Approximately 60 stakeholders participated during the four-day workshop. The mixed-method study started in February, after which data collection and analysis took place.
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 characterised 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.
The results highlighted and quantified exactly where the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the labour market were found and were used to formulate strategies and interventions on how to remove these bottlenecks and reduce inefficiencies. These focused on improving availability, accessibility, availability and quality of health personnel in both rural and urban areas in the whole of Togo. In the coming weeks, a final report on the market labour analysis shall be disseminated.
The study is undertaken with the financial support from WHO within the framework of the French Muskoka Fund. The results of the health labour market analysis will be followed-up by a feasibility study which includes political, social, economic feasibility of the interventions identified during the workshop.
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