• Capacity

Capacity building and health worker training

This article from Human Resources for Health assesses the availability and distribution of healthcare professionals delivering emergency obstetric care in Northern Tanzania. The research found that there are adequate numbers of suitably trained healthcare workers in Tanzania to meet the national standards for healthcare delivery. However, the majority are concentrated in a few centralised locations and the remainder are inefficiently and inequitably distributed in rural areas. Rural areas have restricted access to government-run healthcare because of understaffing, and facilities run by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) have better staffing levels. The health workers in government-run facilities also face significantly higher workloads due to understaffing.

The authors conclude that the availability of trained staff does not translate into the availability of quality emergency obstetrics services due to problems of human resource distribution. The authors recommend that countries like Tanzania should revise their national standards for healthcare delivery and staffing. The focus of these revised standards should be quality of service and not coverage alone. The longer term priority needs to be increasing the numbers of qualified healthcare workers. In the shorter term the focus should be on reducing the number of facilities in rural areas, focusing human resources in a smaller number of significantly upgraded facilities and increasing access to these, by improving transport and communication facilities.

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