Zimpapers Logo

Rumbidzayi Zinyuke-Senior Health Reporter

In a significant move to strengthen Zimbabwe’s healthcare system, Government has taken strides to create a sustainable and resilient health workforce capable of supporting the national development goals.

Early this week, Cabinet approved the Health Workforce Strategy (2023-2030) and the Health Workforce Investment Compact (2024-2026).

Speaking after the Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister Dr Jenfan Muswere outlined the five strategic themes that guide the strategy: education, training and development, deployment, utilisation and governance, retention and migration management, monitoring and evaluation, ICT and research, and planning and financing.

“The education, training and development pillar seeks to align all health worker training programmes with health sector needs, to increase annual training outputs from 3 334 in 2022 to at least 7 000 by 2030 and to professionalise and integrate community health workers into the main workforce and to refurbish and expand training schools’ infrastructure,” said Dr Muswere.

Under the health workforce retention and migration management pillar, he said the aim was to remunerate optimally to reduce the attrition rate by 2030.

The health workforce planning and financing pillar seeks to increase per capita investment in health from the current US$9 to at least US$32, with a long-term goal of US$55 per capita.

The development comes at a time the Government, through the Health Service Commission, is conducting a job evaluation which seeks to realign all 840 jobs within the health sector to their correct grades.

HSC general manager, conditions of service and industrial relations, Mr Michael Sande, said the programme was crucial to ensuring a productive and motivated workforce.

“The programme is going on very well. We have done over 300 jobs so far out of almost 900 that we want.

“We will then find time to review them, but progress is going very well. You will notice that there have been a lot of changes in the medical field in terms of the skills that we had 21 years ago and the skills that we now have,” said Mr Sande.

Midlands provincial medical director Dr Mary Muchekeza said the job evaluation was a vital initiative, which would address most of the grievances among the workforce. There are a “lot of expectations from this exercise”, from which staff expect to see an improvement in salaries that people are taking home.

“This way, they will be satisfied that they are being recognised for who they are. We also expect that there will be clarity in terms of the roles and responsibilities of each job and everyone that works in the Ministry of Health.

“We need to have clear job descriptions to eliminate overlaps because there were some cadres who were overloaded with work whereas others were under-loaded.”