The EHP was initiated by the MOHSW to curb challenges encountered to reach the national HIV & AIDS care and treatment target as well as to address bottlenecks in scaling up the national Care and Treatment services. The project which was of 45 months duration began in February 2007 and will be phasing out in October 31st this year (2010). Mkapa HIV/AIDS Foundation is the executing Partner.
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So far, many project lessons are emerging which are quite potential for scaling up by the government and other likeminded Partner efforts. For instance,
“It has been observed that potentials for success in improving equitable and accessible health services delivery in remote parts of the country is possible when joint efforts are made to ensure that the health system blocks are supported and made to work within the various aspects and parts of this country”. This has been very vividly shown when Regionalized partners tasked with the HIV/AIDS scale up support in this country had been vested with the support of skilled staff health professionals like Medical Doctors/Clinicians, Nurses, Pharmacists and Lab professionals through the EHP project to reach various most remote parts of this country.
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“The project being able to retain more than 80% of hired staff within 30 months period and 95% of them accepting joining the government service (FYs 2009 – 2011), indicate a possibility of unexploited trained health workers in the market who are interested with the public service and thus being potential for attraction and retention”. Likewise the pull factors that contributed to this retention in remote parts of the country needs to be studied further so that critical contributory factors are determined and their specificity identified at zonal and district levels for further scale up. This will also support formulation of standard guidelines which are ‘targeted and focused’ when establishing various attractive HRH incentive packages.
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In summary, we could conclude that, Multisectoral and multidimensional country approaches have a great opportunity of comprehensively addressing some of the HRH related bottlenecks affecting retention and likewise, the rural-urban staff disparity.
Contributing to sustainable Human Resources for Health Management (HRM) efforts in the country; the EHP project has laid good grounds for an ongoing HRH advocacy through supporting the formulation of a HRH advocacy strategy that is under the process of adoption by other in house programmes and country efforts. It also supported the revision of the HRH supportive supervision tool within the National Guideline for Supportive Supervision (NGSS), an exercise that will be scaled up to have most of the districts and regions trained for better HRH support and follow up. The upcoming activities are to be funded by the Tanzania Human Resource Capacity Project.
The Emergency hiring project will soon be evaluated at the end of its 3 phase period (Feb 2007 – October 2010) to learn more on its achievements and bottlenecks that need further interventions. The evaluation will include among others, issues related to the HIV/AIDS services scale up, what works, when, and how, but also see the many factors related to human resource for health aspects as a cornerstone for quality health services delivery in Tanzania.
1 31 (18%) had dropped from the programme between 2007 – June 2009
2 66 (38%) of those hired are already integrated into the Government payroll 2009/2010
