Workforce Planning Tool in Use by MOH
Jun 7 2010
The past year marked significant efforts by the Health Systems 20/20’s Workforce Planning activity team to finalize the Workforce Planning Tool (WPT). The WPT is an Access-based application developed to assist Egypt’s Ministry of Health (MOH) to estimate health facilities’ staffing gaps.
Workforce Planning Tool in Action!
The past year marked significant efforts by the Health Systems 20/20’s Workforce Planning activity team to finalize the Workforce Planning Tool (WPT). The WPT is an Access-based application developed to assist Egypt’s Ministry of Health (MOH) to estimate health facilities’ staffing gaps.; Recently, the MOH began utilizing the tool to identify staffing needs in newly-established “high priority” hospitals. The MOH’s Human Resources Task Force – with training and support from Health Systems 20/20 – has been responsible for collecting required data, processing collected data with the tool, and producing results that assess the current staffing situation and estimate required staffing to operate the facilities according to agreed-upon norms and assumptions.
Although the model has not yet been delivered to the MOH for official use, the MOH’s request to use it for workforce planning indicates its potential importance to the planning process at the central level. The project is helping to institutionalize capacity for workforce planning at the MOH, as demonstrated by the expanded capabilities of the Human Resources Task Force and their growing role in MOH workforce planning efforts.
What is the Workforce Planning Tool?
The Workforce Planning Tool is designed to calculate health facilities' need for medical and administrative staff based on expert-developed productivity norms and actual patient volumes. In a given facility, each staff person is assumed to have a maximum number of available annual working hours, excluding annual leave and administrative duties. Productivity norms, or the time “ideally” spent by different types of medical staff on each clinical activity, define the parameters of the tool. These norms were established through a series of panel discussions hosted by Health Systems 20/20 and attended by highly experienced experts, who had been selected by the MOH to represent staff categories in all medical specialties. Actual patient volume data from a given health facility can then be fed into the tool to produce estimates of: required staff in each department by staff type and area of specialty; the gap between the current and required staff; and ratios between current and required staff, indicating priority areas for intervention. The tool can be used in all types of health facilities that provide preventive or curative services, including Primary Health Centers and hospitals.
The tool was fine-tuned through field consultations with key stakeholders in the three targeted governorates: Gharbia, Assiut, and Luxor. Preliminary results were discussed and actual field experiences in applying the tool were reviewed, so that all aspects affecting implementation could be addressed. The process of incorporating feedback from the field enhanced the efficiency of the tool. Right-sizing health facilities’ workforce will require a plan of action and study of the impact of alternative staffing scenarios for moving ahead. The Health Systems 20/20 team will coordinate with the MOH for setting guidance about how the tool might best be used in the future and developing a workable institutionalization strategy. Ultimately, this tool will help policymakers improve workforce balance and lead to better quality service provision in MOH facilities.
