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Preparing health
professionals to meet the expanding health and social needs of ageing societies
while enabling them to pursue rewarding career paths in their country of origin
is a rising priority for governments in South-eastern Europe, whose health
sectors have been weakened in recent years by external and internal migration.
To discuss strategies for strengthening the technical capacity of the region’s
health workforce through transformative education and solutions to the
geographic imbalance, a high-level meeting organised by WHO/Europe in
collaboration with the South-eastern European Health Network (SEEHN) and the
Medical University of Varna, Bulgaria, took place on 9-10 November in Varna.
Attended by
representatives of health and education ministries, national public health
institutions, and universities from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria,
Croatia, and Moldova, and by WHO experts, the meeting outlined the need for improved
alignment between health workforce education and training curricula on the one
hand and evolving professional competencies required by new models of health
care and changing public health needs on the other. Participants discussed
solutions to existing barriers to cooperation between the health and education
sectors and highlighted the need to establish a systematic process for health
workforce planning with shared responsibility between ministries of health, employment
and finance.
Other priorities
emphasised in the course of the meeting included the need to shift towards
evidence-based professional education and to retain faculty who can deliver it,
to secure political support for enhanced teaching and training modalities, and
to increase intersectoral cooperation by initiating policy dialogues on planned
curriculum reforms with all stakeholders.
The vision of
transformative education includes development of competencies and skills – both
through basic health workforce l education and through continuing professional
development - that are linked to nationally and contextually relevant needs, as
well as to global standards of excellence. Such education aims to maximise the
contributions of all health workers.
Translating this vision
into practice is essential to implementing Health 2020, the European policy
framework for improving the health of populations and reducing health inequities,
in which health professionals play a
central role. To operationalize this vision, countries need strengthened
sub-regional collaboration, continued technical support and cooperation, and greater
alignment between educational
institutions and the systems that are responsible for health service delivery.
The Medical University in
Varna, which hosted the event, is a leading sub-regional institution with a
tradition of building a talent pipeline through cross-specialty,
patient-centred learning for a new generation of health practitioners. One
third of its student body is international and includes students from 44
countries, notably Germany, the Scandinavian region, Spain, and the United
Kingdom.
The meeting in Bulgaria
followed the WHO Regional expert consultations on transformative health
professionals’ education and training in support of Health 2020 and a series of
sub-regional technical meetings on health workforce mobility and retention in
2013 in Moldova and in 2014 in Slovenia , which drew commitment by members of
SEEHN to build a sustainable health workforce responsive to the current and
future health needs of their populations, by establishing a Regional Health Development
Centre on Human Resources for Health.
