Professional Leadership and Education for 21st Century
Venue: TBC
Day and time: Friday, 28 January 2011 - 14:00-15:00
Training and deployment of health workers is a key global workforce challenge for poor and rich countries. Quality education is crucial to achieve the health-related MDGs, particularly for countries facing the most severe worker shortages. This session will address the key challenges of professional education, and propose recommendations of health worker training in the 21st Century.
In the past decade, seeking to achieve the MDGs, global workforce challenges have mostly focused on overcoming the severe crisis in worker shortages through ramp up of training and deployment of basic health workers.
While engagement has been global, special emphasis been applied in sub-Saharan Africa which faces the most severe worker shortages and where achieving the MDGs is more challenging. There has been also growing concern over mal-distribution of the workforce, both within and across nations, as exemplified by the recently endorsed WHA resolution on international migration.
Almost completely neglected has been the professionally trained cadre in all countries, poorer and richer. In most countries, they have monopoly power over many key health functions such as prescription or diagnostic tests. But post-secondary educated health professionals are also invariably the leaders of the health care system, occupying virtually all of the leadership roles especially in ministries of health, the universities, and even many leading NGOs.
In poorer countries seeking to expand coverage, few have addressed the competencies of professionals needed in health teams, and align them with the mainstream health system. In richer countries, there is also significant and growing mal-alignment with outdated curriculum teaching purely technical skills for professionals who enter into labour markets. While many perform key social roles in society, they also mostly aspire to middle-class life and work styles and exacerbate problems of poor rural coverage, high cost and wasteful health care expenditures, and iatrogenic disease.
The objectives of this session include to:-
- Address key challenges of professional education and propose recommendations for education in 21st Century;
- Share countries experiences on how to provide education to meet the challenges.