Countries join together at event to celebrate Year of the Health and Care Workers

Countries from across the globe have joined together to celebrate their participation in the Year of the Health and Care Workers programme, at an event staged by Health Education England (HEE) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

The programme invited colleagues from a range of countries to join a series of online seminars, each addressing key themes in the development of effective strategic workforce planning.  These seminars were led by speakers from around the world, delivering powerful presentations on the theme of workforce planning and development to meet the challenges of world health care provision.

The six teams then joined a series of Action Learning Sets which addressed the specific problems in their own countries and were aligned to their country’s own priorities. Our Higher Education partner the University of Salford led the facilitation of the online ALS’s and completed several in-country events throughout the year.

The countries that took part were:

• Georgia
• Ghana
• Kyrgyzstan
• Malta
• North Macedonia
• South Africa
• Ukraine

Each country’s team was made up of a range of leaders and future leaders from the health and care sector.

This week’s in-person event was designed to provide delegates deeper access to NHS and other countries’ healthcare systems’ experience and expertise, showcase successes and lessons learned.

Kateryna Balabanova, Director of the Center for Nursing Development, Ministry of Health of Ukraine and Mariana Hladkevych, Chief of the Division for Strategic Projects, Management and International Cooperation, National Health Service of Ukraine, said:

“Due to the brutal Russian war against Ukraine health workforce challenges intensified, however many doctors and nurses proved to be resilient continuing serving Ukrainians and saving their lives. The YHCW event in London was a brilliant opportunity to exchange ideas for strategic planning and bring them home for a long-term solutions in workforce development and support. We are proud to collaborate with NHS England, HEE, University of Salford to support our workforce program implementation with their expertise and valuable experience.”  

Dr Maggie Ravhengani – Director of Human Resources Stakeholder Relations and Management, National Department of Health, South Africa, said:

“In the South African context, workforce planning is described as a process of aligning health workforce with current and current and future needs.

“The Year of a Health Care Worker (YHCW) – Closure event has shown us that health workforce planning challenges are homogeneous across the countries, and therefore we can learn a lot from the way other countries approach health workforce planning challenges.

“We would like to continue collaborating with NHS in order to work towards establishing (data driven) workforce planning intelligence for our country, this will assist us in preparing for the National Health Insurance. implementation.”

Tea Bakradze, Chief Specialist at Health Policy division, Ministry of IDPs, Labour, Health and Social Affairs of Georgia, said:

“The HRH direction is at the starting point of systemic development in Georgia and  this process was significantly facilitated by the program provided by HEE, which broadened our vision of how to set priorities and what steps to take to implement these priorities. We see the direction of nursing in our country as particularly problematic, and we are very pleased to have received impressive information about the development of nursing direction. The final event in London was one of the best experiences.

“We really liked the working format, which was active, diverse and interesting. We are glad that We had the opportunity to learn in detail about the experiences of other countries and relate them to the politics of my country.

“We would like the connection between Georgia and HEE to continue, which will contribute to the implementation of planned improvement changes in our country.”

More information on the programme can be found here.