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Côte d’Ivoire Minister of Health Visits Health Systems 20/20 Headquarters

Apr 30 2009

Health Systems 20/20 had the honor of hosting the Honorable Dr. Remi Allah Kouadio, Minister of Health and Public Hygiene of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire and his delegation, April 28, 2009, in the Bethesda office.

This important delegation from the Ministry of Health (MOH) is in the United States on a mission to share their objectives and strategies manifest in the recently published 10-year health sector plan. They are especially interested in support from Health Systems 20/20 in the area of human resource capacity building. The MOH has recruited 2,000 recent medical graduates for public service with the aim of improving service coverage country wide, especially in underserved areas. They plan to implement “task shifting” for these general practitioners, providing condensed specialized training, enabling them to provide a range of specialized services throughout the country.

Task shifting is the name now given to a process whereby specific tasks are moved, where appropriate, to health workers with shorter training and fewer qualifications. By reorganizing the workforce in this way, task shifting can make more efficient use of existing human resources and ease bottlenecks in service delivery. Where further additional human resources are needed, task shifting may also involve the delegation of clearly delineated tasks to newly created cadres of health workers who receive specific, competency-based training.

Health Systems 20/20 and its predecessor projects, Partnerships for Health Reform and Partners for Health Reformplus, have a long history supporting the health sector in Côte d’Ivoire, dating back to the mid-1990s. Health Systems 20/20 has provided technical support to the Ivorian MOH through:

Assessments

Human resource capacity building

  • Training over 300 district and regional health personnel, in collaboration with the training directorate of the MOH in leadership and management
  • Working with the directorate of human resources to computerize human resources records
  • Collaborating with training institutions to help increase the number and quality of new graduates (providing assistance to rehabilitate the library at the country’s primary training institution – Institut National de Formation des Agents Sanitaires (INFAS) – and extending this support to help build an e-library and conducting an emergency hiring of training instructors)

Health financing

Accompanying the Minister were Dr. Mamadou Kone, Technical Advisor for Health Systems; Dr. Virginie Traoré, Director/Program Coordinator for PNPEC (Programme National de Prise en Charge des Personnes vivant avec le VIH – National AIDS Program); Dr. Eliane Abbe, Director/Program Coordinator for Reproductive Health and Family Planning; and Ms. Georgette Mbrah, Counselor, representing the Embassy of Côte d'Ivoire.