Informal Consultation on the Draft Regional Human Resources for Health Strategy
Place: Manila, Philippines
Date: 21 Nov, 2005 - 23 Nov, 2005
The importance of human resources for health (HRH) for health system performance and quality of health care is widely recognized. Scaling up major health interventions to deal with persisting and emerging health threats and achieving the health-related Millenium Development Goals require a health workforce that is sufficient in numbers, appropriate as to profiles, educated and trained, and adequately deployed, managed and motivated. However, many countries are faced with challenges in their health workforces, such as shortages of workers, skill-mix imbalances, mal-distribution, and weak health workforce knowledge base, thereby hampering planning, policy development, and programme operations. This meeting was held in order to facilitate inputs and comments from selected experts, countries and other stakeholders, including WHO technical staff, on the draft strategy. The objectives of the meeting were:(1) to review and revise the draft regional strategy so as to make it relevant and useful for WHO's collaboration and support to country needs and priorities; and(2) to identify approaches to strengthen HRH regional networking and resource mobilization. Fifteen temporary advisers, six observers and eight secretariat members participated in the consultation. The consultation concluded that the revised draft regional strategy onhuman resources for health 2006-2015 is a comprehensive and technically sound document. It also concluded that the strategy is a useful guide for strengthening HRH capacity of countries in the Region as well as for WHO collaborative work with all stakeholders. The consultation further recommended the strengthening of country and institutional capacity in the areas of HRH research, policy development, planning, management and advocacy, with WHO support where possible.