By Mako Jerera
Cabinet has approved a comprehensive Health Workforce Strategy: 2023-2030 and Health Workforce Investment Compact: 2024-2026, aimed at bolstering the country’s healthcare system and ensuring a sustainable supply of skilled healthcare professionals.
Speaking at the Post Cabinet briefing yesterday, the Minister of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Dr Jenfan Muswere, outlined a roadmap to address the critical challenges facing the health workforce and align it with Zimbabwe’s broader economic development goals.
“The Health Workforce Strategy: 2023-2030 aims at ensuring a sustainable and resilient health workforce capable of supporting Zimbabwe’s goal of becoming an upper-middle-income economy by 2030.
The Strategy encompasses five key strategic themes: Education, Training and Development; Deployment, Utilization and Governance; Retention and Migration Management; Monitoring and Evaluation, ICT and Research; and Planning and Financing.
These themes seek to ensure a well-trained, motivated, and adequately resourced health workforce capable of delivering high-quality healthcare services to the population.
Dr Muswere explained that the Education, Training and Development pillar seeks to align all health worker training programmes with health sector needs, to increase annual training outputs from 3 334 in 2022 to at least 7 000 by 2030, to professionalize and integrate community health workers into the main workforce and to refurbish and expand training schools infrastructure.
“The Health Workforce Monitoring, Evaluation, ICT and Research pillar aims to strengthen the Health Workforce Management Information System (MIS), to digitalise the Health Workforce management systems, and to strengthen Health Workforce Research to inform the decision-making processes,” he added.
Furthermore, the Health Workforce Planning and Financing pillar seeks to increase per capita investment in health from the current US$9 to at least US$32, with a long-term goal of US$55 per capita.
Key strategic interventions include increasing domestic resources mobilization and aligning investments in the health workforce by Government, the private sector and Development Partners.
The approval of the Health Workforce Strategy marks a significant step towards improving the health of the Zimbabwean population. By addressing the challenges facing the health workforce and investing in its development, the government is committed to building a resilient and sustainable healthcare system that can meet the needs of all citizens.
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