Where We Work > Africa > Ghana

Ghana

Ghana faces a serious shortage of health workers, with only one physician and ten nurses and midwives per 10,000 people. Through CapacityPlus, IntraHealth is supporting Ghana’s efforts to strengthen its health workforce. The project’s assistance began with an assessment in October 2010 to explore gaps in health workforce skills development. Using CapacityPlus’s Human Resources Management Rapid Assessment Tool, the study identified priority interventions to address challenges related to the planning, coordination, resourcing, and implementation of preservice education, as well as for the health workforce more broadly. Following the assessment, CapacityPlus is assisting the Ghana Ministry of Health, Ghana Health Services, and other partners in several key areas:

  • Supporting the sustainable functioning of the Ghana Health Workforce Observatory, a national body that provides coordination and leadership on health workforce issues
  • Collaborating on  the development and drafting of Ghana’s new five-year Human Resource Policy and Strategy for the health sector, including plans for scaling-up pre-service education
  • Developing the systems and capacity to measure and track national health worker production targets and the supply pipeline
  • Strengthening the use and application of health workforce data for evidence-based planning and decision-making, including rolling out a national human resources information system (HRIS)
  • Applying assessment protocols to guide school investment plans for preservice education scale-up, and reforming the management of health professional schools through organizational development approaches and management analysis tools
  • Supporting the Christian Health Association of Ghana to integrate and strengthen its existing human resources management capacity and systems.

Previous IntraHealth work in Ghana encompassed a variety of activities to strengthen health workers and services. These included strengthening midwives’ counseling skills in adolescent reproductive health; designing a self-paced learning approach to train doctors, nurses, and midwives in postabortion care and safe motherhood skills as an alternative to their traditional classroom-based training; improving the performance of Regional Resource Teams in conducting training and supervision for midwives in life-saving skills and postabortion care; and supporting Ghana Health Services to expand its Community-Based Health Planning and Services initiative by assisting with clinical training and performance improvement.

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