Recognition of the health worker crisis in Africa has stimulated debate on what works to deploy and retain health workers in critical levels of African health systems. Most east and southern African (ESA) countries suffer a critical shortage of health workers with fewer than 2.5 skilled health workers per 1000 population, less than the level needed for the most necessary health interventions. The shortfall contributes to the persistence of high disease burdens and poorly developed health systems. These factors together with poor management systems and lack of appreciation of health workers drive further losses of health workers in a vicious cycle. With a Malawian woman having a probability of dying during childbirth that is 130 times greater than that of her American counterpart and faltering progress towards achieving millennium development goals in the region, acting on this health worker crisis has become a matter of global concern. While many policies and strategies are being proposed, answering the question what makes health workers stay in African health systems provides one direction for action.
Many factors responsible for health worker shortages, especially those related to global migration of health workers, are beyond the control of individual countries in ESA and call for wider international action. However there are important ways in which ESA countries can act to deploy and retain health workers in the health systems in the region, and there is learning to exchange from the combination of financial and non-financial incentives being used with varying degrees of success to retain available staff.
As an immediate measure many countries are using financial incentives like salary increases and allowances to send an early signal to attract or stem losses of health workers. To stabilize and sustain these, including in more inflationary environments, a range of non-financial incentives are also being used, such as training and career path-related opportunities, housing, transport, childcare facilities, free food, employee support centres, improvements in working conditions, better facilities and workplace security and improvements in management and human resource information systems.
Recognising the specific contexts affecting the approaches used in countries, there is scope for learning from the impact of measures being used in the region.
The Malawian health worker retention strategy, for example, is a combination of financial and non-financial incentives through a six-year, $272 million emergency human resources programme with budget support from the Government of Malawi, the Department for International Development (DFID) and The Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. Blending these significant sources of budget support, the measures have (at least in the short term) managed to overcome the massive absolute shortfall across the system as a whole and to attract and retain health workers in Malawi. Some incentives address the factors that push workers out of the health system more directly. Swaziland responded for example to the high HIV and AIDS burden among the health workforce through the establishment of a wellness centre for health workers in collaboration with the Swaziland Nursing Association and the International Council of Nurses (ICN). Some countries have reduced the bureaucracy slowing the recruitment of health workers. Tanzania and Kenya have for example involved partners from the private sector to implement more easily administered emergency hiring plans for hard-to-staff areas.
Many countries face issues of internal migration and use incentives to more effectively retain workers in remote or underserved areas. Zambia, has for example, been able to attract staff to rural areas using a comprehensive package of financial and non-financial incentives, originally for doctors but currently extended to other health workers. Uganda made government service more attractive than the private sector through salary enhancement and non-financial incentives like training opportunities, support for research and a Yellow Star Award programme that recognises facilities that have consistently excellent performance. South Africa has used financial incentives in the form of rural and scarce skills allowances for under-served areas, in addition to compulsory community service.
Implementing these incentives and monitoring their impact calls for improved strategic management skills with greater flexibility to respond to rapidly changing conditions. A number of countries have set up autonomous health service boards and commissions to address health worker needs independently of the public service commissions to provide flexibility. This has had mixed results, depending on the resources and power that these boards have. The Zambian Health Service Board had a difficult beginning largely because most of the powers remained with the central public service commission. The Uganda Health Service Commission and the Health Board in Zimbabwe have been reported to function more effectively although their impact on health worker outcomes are not yet well assessed. Approaches that have evolved through consultation with all stakeholders, including the health workers and development partners, that are linked to strategic plans and funded from national budget or pooled funds, instead of vertical schemes, have tended to be more successful. Vertical schemes have suffered from lack of continuity and sustainability.
While experience is growing in the region around incentives for retention, assessing and sharing what works and what doesn’t work is constrained by lack of systematic documentation and limited monitoring and evaluation mechanisms. Success stories and success factors are thus not always well recognized locally or accessible to other countries. Weaknesses in monitoring and review systems also slow the response to unanticipated negative outcomes of schemes. For instance, in both Uganda and Tanzania, introduction of better pay for public sector health workers was accompanied by a net movement of health workers from faith-based facilities to government services, leaving many areas where only faith-based services were available to poor communities underserved. Recognising this, national and regional organizations in EQUINET are documenting experience and impacts in selected countries in the region.
There are good reasons for investing in retention incentives and for more effectively managing this aspect of health systems. Firstly, training health workers is costly and takes long; and without measures for retention there is no guarantee that the trainees will stay after completion of their studies. The loss of public sector training investments is an area of high cost of outmigration to the public health systems of Africa. Secondly, failure to retain staff has direct and knock-on costs, such loss of institutional memory, loss of morale and increased workload for the remaining workers and higher costs to the community to seek care at higher levels. In contrast retention strategies send an affirmative message to health workers that they are valued and this sends positive signals to attract more health workers. Further, measures for retention of health workers have positive implications for equity as they direct resources towards hard-to-staff facilities in rural, remote areas or those serving poor populations who have limited capacity to pay for private health care.
Please send feedback or queries on the issues raised in this briefing to the EQUINET secretariat admin@equinetafrica.org. EQUINET Theme work on health worker retention is co-ordinated at Unversity of Namibia and is being implemented in co-operation with the ECSA Health Community. For further information and publications on this issue please visit www.equinetafrica.org.
1. Editorial
2. Latest Equinet Updates
Call Closes On December 7, 2007!
This call invites applicants to participate and share experiences in a Regional Training Workshop for east and southern African countries on Participatory Methods for research and training for a people centred health system being held on February 27 to March 1st 2008.
The training aims to support work at national, district and local level with health systems and communities in health, with a major focus on the interactions at primary health care level. The 2008 training will focus on overcoming community and health systems barriers in accessing comprehensive prevention and treatment for HIV and AIDS and strengthening equitable primary health care responses to HIV and AIDS.
This study reviews the Zambian deprivation-based health resource allocation formula and assesses how the deprivation-based resource allocation formula has been implemented in terms of achieving the initial desired goals of resource – re-distribution. It further considers the extent of converge or divergence in the equity goals relating to resource re-distribution through the allocation of funding to the districts.
The workshop took participants through the writing process from developing a key message, planning the structure of writing, to writing the specific sections of scientific papers such as the title, abstract, keywords, executive summary, introduction, methodology, results and discussion, conclusions and references; on various aspects of peer-reviewed publishing and on issues of authorship, copyright and plagiarism.
3. Equity in Health
Income inequality is widely assumed to be a major contributor to poorer health at national and subnational levels. According to this assumption, the most appropriate policy strategy to improve equity in health is income redistribution. This paper considers reasons why tackling income inequality alone could be an inadequate approach to reducing differences in health across social classes and other population subgroups, and makes the case that universal social programs are critical to reducing inequities in health. A health system oriented around a strong primary care base is an example of such a strategy.
MHEN held a National Forum on 22nd and 23rd November 2007 at Lilongwe Hotel. It brought together a network of policy makers and practitioners who work in the field of health services delivery. The forum explored the challenges in health services delivery in a non-industrialised country with limited resources.
Visualizing inequalities in health at the world scale is not easily achieved from tables of mortality rates. Maps that show rates using a colour scale often are less informative than many map-readers realize. For instance, a country with a very small land area receives less attention, whereas a large, sparsely populated area on a map is more obvious. Furthermore, unlike our visual ability to compare the lengths of bars in a chart, we do not have a natural aptitude for translating different colours or shades to the magnitudes they represent. Here we introduce another approach to mapping the world that can be useful for illustrating inequalities in health. This article looks at various ways of mapping and visualising global health statistics.
The relationship between AIDS and poverty has more to do with inequality than poverty per se. The relationship between socioeconomic status and HIV varies considerably from country to country, reflecting differences in culture and traditions. Effective actions to tackle AIDS must directly address these specific factors—the inequalities—that drive HIV transmission in different contexts, and must overcome the obstacles to accessing treatment in different groups. It is crucial to place AIDS squarely at the centre of all socio-economic development, and provide long-term, high-level domestic and international investment in HIV prevention and treatment in the world's poorest countries.
4. Values, Policies and Rights
This abbreviated version of the Policy on Quality in Health Care for South Africa follows on the original that became national policy in 2001. It comes at a time when the public health care system is in dire need of again refocusing its collective efforts towards improving the quality of care provided in public health facilities and communities. Knowing that quality is never an accident, always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skilfull execution, and that it represents the wise choice of many alternatives, this abbreviated version attempts to provide to all public health officials in a nutshell and in a more reader friendly language, the strategic direction health facilities and officials need to follow to assure quality in health care and continuous improvement in the care that is being provided. Health care personnel are encouraged to use this copy of the Policy to focus their intentions and guide their efforts.
This document describes the priorities for the National Health Department.
The Act is intended to provide a framework for a structured uniform health system within the Republic, taking into account the obligations imposed by the Constitution and other laws on the national, provincial and local governments with regard to health services; and to provide for matters connected therewith
The Department of Health conducted a review of the period 1999-2004 to determine what work is outstanding and what new work is needed to provide the necessary stewardship of the South African health system.This process has resulted in the adoption of a new set of priorities described in this document.
5. Health equity in economic and trade policies
In recent years, there have been increasing concerns about macroeconomic policy constraints interfering with the ability of many African governments to increase health sector spending and getting access to urgently needed funds for HIV/AIDS human resource development. The International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and, in particular, the IMF have been accused of undermining health care systems in many developing countries through conditionalities that favour budgetary ceilings as a panacea for macroeconomic stability. The economic policies sometimes affect overall spending, resulting in caps on the health sector, salary and recruitment of health workers and the acceptance of large amounts of financial assistance. AFRODAD has conducted a two country study aimed at looking at the links between macroeconomic frameworks provided by the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and the social spending, and in particular, the fight against HIV/AIDS in Ghana and Malawi. This study reviewed the major channels through which fiscal and monetary policies impact on public expenditure frameworks and how this, in turn, affects the ability of the countries under study to design and implement public programmes concerning those living with and affected by HIV/AIDS and assessing the debt positions of the case studies to see how the HIV/AIDS has impacted on their financial portfolios and planning abilities or vice-versa.
Member governments of the World Health Organisation (WHO) ended a week of intensive negotiations on a global strategy and plan of action to improve access to health care in developing countries, in particular, health research and development on diseases disproportionately affecting developing countries. The negotiations at the WHO Intergovernmental Working Group (IGWG) on Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights, chaired by Peter Oldham of Canada, were suspended on 10 November evening to resume again at a meeting tentatively set for 28 April to 3 May 2008. At the six-day talks, the negotiators are reported to have made some progress in a few areas, but with considerable and difficult negotiations ahead to agree and draw up "a global strategy and plan of action".
Pages
6. Poverty and health
School-based health and nutrition interventions in developing countries aim at improving children’s nutrition and learning ability. In addition to the food and health inputs, children need access to education that is relevant to their lives, of good quality, and effective in its approach. Based on evidence from the Zambia Nutrition Education in Basic Schools (NEBS) project, this article examines whether and to what extent school-based health and nutrition education can contribute directly to improving the health and nutrition behaviors of school children. Initial results suggest that gains in awareness, knowledge and behavior can be achieved among children and their families with an actively implemented classroom program backed by teacher training and parent involvement, even in the absence of school-based nutrition and health services.
Urbanisation can and should be beneficial for health. In general, nations that have high life expectancies and low infant mortality rates are also those where city government leaders and policies address the key social determinants of health. Within developing countries, the best local governance can help produce 75 years or more of life expectancy; with bad urban governance, life expectancy can be as low as 35 years. Better housing and living conditions, access to safe water and good sanitation, efficient waste management systems, safer working environments and neighborhoods, food security, and access to services like education, health, welfare, public transportation and child care are examples of social determinants of health that can be addressed through good urban governance. Failure of governance in today’s cities has resulted in the growth of informal settlements and slums that constitute an unhealthy living and working environment for a billion people. National government institutions need to equip local governments with the mandate, powers, jurisdiction, responsibilities, resources and capacity to undertake “healthy urban governance”. A credible health agenda is one that benefits all people in cities, especially the urban poor who live in informal settlements.
7. Equitable health services
In the quest to improve the safety of health services and thus align ourselves in part with the international challenges set by the World Health Organisation Global Patient Safety drive, a National Infection Prevention Strategy and Control Policy and accompanying strategy have been developed and presented to all health care personnel in the country.
The goal of this policy is to help management and staff minimize the risk of TB transmission in health care facilities and other facilities where the risk of transmission of TB may be high due to high prevalence of both diagnosed and undiagnosed TB such as prisons.
Pages
8. Human Resources
Speakers at a two-day international conference in Africa on midwifery have called for more incentives to attract young people into the midwifery profession. They said the midwives of today were fast ageing and that unless immediate measures were put in place to attract more young ones into the profession, the fight for the reduction in maternal and infant mortality and morbidity would be a mirage. The speakers made the call at a two-day international conference of midwives on the theme, "African Midwives: Uniting to address the reduction of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity".
Dr Tshabala-Msimang said for Africa to scale up health work-force training, there is a need to mobilise adequate resources. She appealed to the developed world which has largely benefited from this exodus of health workers, to consider financially supporting Africa to train more health workers. Additional resources will also be required to rebuild the health infrastructure in some instances as well as training our lecturers, tutors and researchers.
In responding to the goal of rapidly increasing access to antiretroviral treatment (ART), the government of Botswana undertook a major review of its health systems options to increase access to human resources, one of the major bottlenecks preventing people from receiving treatment. In mid-2004, a team of government and World Health Organization (WHO) staff reviewed the situation and identified a number of public sector scale up options. The team also reviewed the capacity of private practitioners to participate in the provision of ART. Subsequently, the government created a mechanism to include private practitioners in rolling out ART. At the end of 2006, more than 4500 patients had been transferred to the private sector for routine follow up. It is estimated that the cooperation reduced the immediate need for recruiting up to 40 medically qualified staff into the public sector over the coming years, depending on the development of the national standard for the number and duration of patient visits to a doctor per year. Thus welcome relief was brought, while at the same time not exercising a pull factor on human resources for health in the sub-Saharan region.
The School of Medicine at Muhimbili is the main doctor-training institution in the country. It runs a five-year MD programme taking 200 students annually. As for many schools in low-income countries, the majority of teachers have no formal training in educational theory. The learning environment at the school has some strengths that should to be amplified, and numerous weaknesses that need to be corrected in order to make the environment more conducive to teaching and learning.
9. Public-Private Mix
Previous studies in the public sector in Tanzania, have demonstrated major prescribing problems due to poly-pharmacy and irrational use of antibiotics and injections. Little is understood about prescribing in the private sector. This paper measures and compares prescribing practices in public and private dispensaries in Kibaha District Tanzania. Prescribing of antibiotic and injections was significantly higher in private than in public dispensaries (P<0.05). The extent of prescribing in private dispensaries calls for intervention to reduce overuse of antibiotics and injections.
A cross sectional study was conducted in rural areas of Kibaha district within the Coastal region of Tanzania to assess knowledge on dosage, storage, expiry and dispensing practices of antimalarial drugs among households, drug stores and ordinary shops. The majority of drug store (53 %) and ordinary retail shop (75 %) sellers did not dispense correct doses of antimalarials due to low literacy and lack of dosage guidelines or package inserts. In order to reduce incidences of drug poisoning due to over-dosage or drug resistance due to under dosage, there is need to educate both consumers and dispensers on correct dosage regimens through mass media such as radio, health education programs, television, posters, leaflets and newspapers.
This study analyses the economic potential of pharmaceutical production of Anti Retroviral Drugs (ARVs) in Tanzania. This includes an analysis of the pharmaceutical sector in the country and the potential to export ARVs to the region. The study shows that production of pharmaceutical products in Tanzania is on the rise and can become viable in the long term. Even though the overall drug market is rather small, public health related drugs have a significant, largely donor based, market.
The UN health chief urged countries to come up with new ways to make medicine for HIV/AIDS and other diseases more affordable in the world's poorest countries, without stifling innovation among pharmaceutical companies. WHO's 193 member states are looking to forge a global strategy on the highly divisive issues of drug development, patenting and pricing.
10. Resource allocation and health financing
Member states of the African Union pledged at the 2001 Abuja summit to commit at least 15% of national budgets to healthcare but 6 years later have largely failed to do so. This failure amongst others has resulted in the annual loss of an estimated 8 million African lives to preventable, treatable and manageable diseases and health conditions. In other words Africa has lost a staggering estimated 40 million lives since 2001 due to a failure to develop, implement and fund comprehensive Public Health policies alone. African governments are not yet all working collectively or quickly enough to analyse and resolve the long term big picture and real scale of Africa’s health catastrophe. Many appear to be relying mainly on international efforts from wealthy philanthropists, donor countries and facilities such as the Global Fund to resolve Africa’s accumulated Public Health problems. Some are also still focusing on only some specific diseases without long-term perspectives to ensure that Public Health is comprehensively promoted to resolve what are essentially interlinked symptoms of one problem – the lack of a comprehensive long term Public Health policy and planning across Africa.
Donor funding for HIV/AIDS has skyrocketed in the last decade: from US$ 300 million in 1996 to US$ 8.9 billion in 2006; yet, little is understood about how these resources are being spent. This paper analyses the policies and practices of the world’s largest AIDS donors as they are applied in Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia. The report offers a number of recommendations for how donors can improve their programmes to increase the effectiveness of aid. Recommendations for all three donors include: jointly coordinate and plan activities to support the National AIDS Plan, assist the government in tracking total national AIDS funds, focus on building and measuring capacity, and develop strategies with host governments and other donors to ensure financial sustainability.
The Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria today approved 73 new grants worth more than US$ 1.1 billion over two years. The Board has also approved US$ 130 million for renewal of five grants that have reached the end of their five year life. More than 80 percent of the approved Round 7 grants are for low-income countries, with the majority of resources (66 percent) for Africa. Asia and the Western Pacific will receive 13 percent of the newly approved funding, Latin America and the Caribbean five percent, Eastern Europe three percent, and the Middle East 13 percent.
The act is intended to consolidate the laws relating to registered medical schemes; to provide for the establishment of the Council for Medical Schemes as a juristic person; to provide for the appointment of the Registrar of Medical Schemes; to make provision for the registration and control of certain activities of medical schemes; to protect the interests of members of medical schemes; to provide for measures for the coordination of medical schemes; and to provide for incidental matters.
11. Equity and HIV/AIDS
The situation in Swaziland has deteriorated since the beginning of the
1990’s.While HIV/AIDS is not solely to blame for the reduction in living standards and life expectancy, it has compounded the effects of other events such as drought and falling foreign direct investment (FDI). Swazi society is in distress - overwhelming sickness, an increasing dependency ratio and thousands of OVC are placing households and communities under extreme duress. In Swaziland, HIV amd AIDS is creating a chronic emergency that is permanently altering development. This demonstrates a ‘new’ disaster that exceeds emergency thresholds and requires a new style of holistic response. While the traditional threshold approach to identifying emergencies remains useful for classifying ‘traditional’ disasters, a new framework of analysis is needed for HIV/AIDS. This could take the form of an index system or a series of thresholds. Within this it is crucial that the indicators measured are considered over time, with a sustained fall being the prime indication of an emergency. The element of ‘time’ has been missing from the debate surrounding humanitarian response.
The overall goal of the National Policy on HIV/AIDS is to provide for a framework for leadership and coordination of the National multisectoral response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This includes formulation, by all sectors, of appropriate interventions which will be effective in preventing transmission of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted infections, protecting and supporting vulnerable groups, mitigating the social and economic impact of HIV/AIDS. It also provides for the framework for strengthening the capacity of institutions, communities and individuals in all sectors to arrest the spread of the epidemic.
The Strategic Framework is intended to operationalise the National Policy on HIV/AIDS. It provides strategic guidance for developing and implementing HIV/AIDS interventions by various partners. It identifies priority logical set of goals, principles, objectives and strategies to guide multisectoral responses to ensure a strengthened, effective and coordinated national response to the epidemic. It puts strong emphasis on community-based response, that communities are fully empowered and involved in formulating and implementing own responses. It is closely linked with other national development initiatives including Vision 2025, Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF).
Pages
12. Governance and participation in health
Civil Society Organisations, especially those actively engaged with the health sector, have been largely of the opinion that the Commission constitutes a major opportunity to address key issues in the health sector. This is especially so as the Commission is seen to be engaged in examining and taking forward some of the key fundamentals of the Alma Ata declaration – viz. a Health Systems approach that foregrounds Primary Health Care and locating health in a larger social, economic and political context.
Good public-health decisionmaking is dependent on reliable and timely statistics on births and deaths (including the medical causes of death). All high-income countries, without exception, have national civil registration systems that record these events and generate regular, frequent, and timely vital statistics. By contrast, these statistics are not available in many low-income and lower-middle-income countries, even though it is in such settings that premature mortality is most severe and the need for robust evidence to back decisionmaking most critical. Civil registration also has a range of benefits for individuals in terms of legal status, and the protection of economic, social, and human rights. However, over the past 30 years, the global health and development community has failed to provide the needed technical and financial support to countries to develop civil registration systems. There is no single blueprint for establishing and maintaining such systems and ensuring the availability of sound vital statistics. Each country faces a different set of challenges, and strategies must be tailored accordingly. There are steps that can be taken, however, and we propose an approach that couples the application of methods to generate better vital statistics in the short term with capacity-building for comprehensive civil registration systems in the long run.
13. Monitoring equity and research policy
Most developing countries do not have fully effective civil registration systems to provide necessary information about population health. Interim approaches—both innovative strategies for collection of data, and methods of assessment or estimation of these data—to fill the resulting information gaps have been developed and refined over the past four decades. To respond to the needs for data for births, deaths, and causes of death, data collection systems such as population censuses, sample vital registration systems, demographic surveillance sites, and internationally-coordinated sample survey programmes in combination with enhanced methods of assessment and analysis have been successfully implemented to complement civil registration systems. Methods of assessment and analysis of incomplete information or indirect indicators have also been improved, as have approaches to ascertainment of cause of death by verbal autopsy, disease modelling, and other strategies. Our knowledge of demography and descriptive epidemiology of populations in developing countries has been greatly increased by the widespread use of these interim approaches; although gaps remain, particularly for adult mortality.
In May 2006, the Ministers of Health of all African countries, at a special session of the African Union, undertook to institutionalise efficiency monitoring within their respective national health information management systems. The specific objectives of this study were: (i) to assess the technical efficiency of National Health Systems (NHSs) of African countries for measuring male and female life expectancies, and (ii) to assess changes in health productivity over time with a view to analysing changes in efficiency and changes in technology. The analysis was based on a five-year panel data (1999-2003) from all 53 countries. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) − a non-parametric linear programming approach − was employed to assess the technical efficiency. Malmquist Total Factor Productivity (MTFP) was used to analyse efficiency and productivity change over time among the 53 countries' national health systems. The data consisted of two outputs (male and female life expectancies) and two inputs (per capital total health expenditure and adult literacy). All the 53 countries' national health systems registered improvements in total factor productivity, attributable mainly to technical progress. Over half of the countries' national health systems had a pure efficiency index of less than one, signifying that those countries' NHSs pure efficiency contributed negatively to productivity change.
This report begins by identifying six problems which make developing the evidence base on the social determinants of health potentially difficult. In order to overcome these difficulties a number of principles are described which help move the measurement of the social determinants forward. The report proceeds by describing in detail what the evidence based approach entails including reference to equity proofing. The implications of methodological diversity are also explored. A framework for developing, implementing, monitoring and evaluating policy is outlined. At the centre of the framework is the policy-making process which is described beginning with a consideration of the challenges of policies relating to the social determinants.
14. Useful Resources
This volume aims to provide researchers and analysts with a step-by-step practical guide to the measurement of a variety of aspects of health equity. Each chapter includes worked examples and computer code. This is intended to help build more comprehensive monitoring of trends in health equity, a better understanding of the causes of these inequities, more extensive evaluation of the impacts of development programs on health equity, and more effective policies and programs to reduce inequities in the health sector.
These guidelines focus on the inpatient management of the major causes of childhood mortality such as pneumonia, diarrhoea, malaria, severe malnutrition, meningitis, HIV, neonatal and related conditions. The basis of these guidelines is the WHO IMCI Manual, “The Management of the Child with a Serious Illness or Severe Malnutrition.” This booklet is a result of a workshop in Machakos in February 2004 drawing together experienced paediatricians from the Ministry of Health, Kenyatta National Hospital, KEMRI and the University of Nairobi. It deals with the management of seriously ill children in the first 48 hours.
15. Jobs and Announcements
The theme of the third national conference of peer education, HIV and AIDS, is 'Stigma, lets act now'. The conference will bring together participants from diverse peer education groups in Kenya and the region, and organisations implementing different aspects of HIV and AIDS, treatment, care and support.
A short video is now available on the website of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Global Health Workforce Alliance. In it, Dr Omaswa refers to the first Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, to be held in Kampala , Uganda , on 2-7 March 2008. This conference is a remarkable and unique opportunity to bring together all those who are working to meet the needs of health workers in developing countries - whether our focus is on Skills, Equipment, Information, Structural support, Medicines, Incentives, and/or Communication facilities. Together participants can "plan and build a global movement to ensure that every person in every village everywhere has access to a skilled, motivated and supported health worker". The Forum meshes well with current movements to revitalize primary health care on the 60th anniversary of WHO, 30 years after Alma Ata. It promises to be an exciting and critical next step for achieving global goals and re-energising the global movement for better health in the 21st century. It is also an opportunity for HIFA2015 and CHILD2015 members to meet up.
This new program approaches health outcomes from the demand side through a multisectoral perspective, looking into mechanisms such as Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), and Sector Wide Approaches (SWAPs). The course underscores the different roles necessary at each different sector for a multisectoral approach, the need for coordination at the central level, and also alignment of donors with national processes - especially budgets - to ensure harmonization. This course will build capacity for developing multisectoral health outcome strategies, emphasizing that better effective interventions, actions and policies exist and that adaptation to the country situation is critical. The application deadline is 22 February 2008.
The seminar series aims to provide a forum where cutting-edge research and ideas on innovation, access to knowledge and intellectual property, from a development perspective, are presented and debated. Speakers are researchers and policy analysts especially from the South who focus their work on key issues for developing countries and the international community more generally. The seminar series plays an important role in linking local/national circumstances and challenges, and the norm-setting activities in various international institutions and process. By engaging negotiators and key players in international processes, the seminars will also contribute to promoting evidence-based norm-setting in key institutions such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Trade Organization (WTO), among other organisations and processes.
The Innovation and Access to Knowledge Programme (IAKP) of the South Centre seeks applicants for a 12 month Research Fellowship in Innovation, Public Health and Intellectual Property. Applicants should send their applications indicating their interest and highlighting their relevant qualifications and experience as well as detailed CVs, letter of interest, references, preferably by email, by 18h00 Central European Time (CET) on 14 December 2007 to: Ms. Caroline Ngome Eneme, Administrative Assistant, Innovation and Access to Knowledge Programme, South Centre, Chemin du Champ D’Anier 17, P.O.B. 228, 1211 Genev
Published by the Regional Network for Equity in Health in east and southern Africa (EQUINET) with technical support from Training and Research Support Centre (TARSC). Contact EQUINET at admin@equinetafrica.org and visit our website at www.equinetafrica.org
Website: http://www.equinetafrica.org/newsletter
SUBMITTING NEWS: Please send materials for inclusion in the EQUINET NEWS to editor@equinetafrica.org Please forward this to others.
SUBSCRIBE: The Newsletter comes out monthly and is delivered to subscribers by e-mail. Subscription is free. To subscribe, visit http://www.equinetafrica.org or send an email to info@equinetafrica.org
This newsletter is produced under the principles of 'fair use'. We strive to attribute sources by providing direct links to authors and websites. When full text is submitted to us and no website is provided, we make the text available as provided.
The views expressed in this newsletter, including the signed editorials, do not necessarily represent those of EQUINET or the institutions in its steering committee. While we make every effort to ensure that all facts and figures quoted by authors are accurate, EQUINET and its steering committee institutions cannot be held responsible for any inaccuracies contained in any articles. Please contact editor@equinetafrica.org immediately regarding any issues arising.