12 Sep 2016

Deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health, Dr Tebogo Bagopi says health sector continues to face challenges, despite the success they have had.
Speaking at the National Stakeholder Consultative workshop for Health Sector Resource Development Plan in Francistown recently, Dr Bagopi said the workshop provided a conducive environment for key players in the health arena to dialogue and interrogate their strategy for the National Human Resource Development Strategy (NHRDS).
She said in human capital development, Botswana had invested significantly in health and other sectors, despite high public spending and it was ranked 109 out of 185 countries in the Human Development Index of the United Nations (UN), therefore she called stakeholders to pause and introspect.
Dr Bagopi said they continued to face challenges of mismatch between health expenditure and expected outcome, which was attributed to low evidence based implementation, low workforce productivity, lack of essential supplies and low utilisation of primary health facilities.
She said there was an existence of a mismatch between graduates skills and the needs of the health and economic sector, hence shortage of trained and qualified staff.
Dr Bagopi explained that they would focus on access to good quality health care and utilisation of health services.
She implored stakeholders to achieve their goals, adding that it required amongst other inputs, a system of training and developing an adequately qualified workforce to meet the health needs of the economy.
She said in moving forward beyond the Vision 2016, the envisioned Vision 2036 highlights that human resources were critical for service delivery.
Therefore, she noted as a country, the health sector has to implement human resources strategy focusing on reducing the shortage of health professionals and distribution of health professionals.
She emphasised the need to ensure that staff have the necessary skills to deliver the required services, improve performance, motivate resources and coordinate human resource planning across the health sector.
Dr Bagopi implored the stakeholders to create a system whereby the buyers of the service could have a voice on the suppliers of the workforce.
She urged them to take note of the new proposed vision statement, which says by 2036, Botswana would have succeeded in developing a highly skilled workforce capable of sustaining competitiveness of Botswana export clusters. ENDS