Touch Symposium discusses new McKinsey report
On June 5, we held our second Touch Symposium on Human Resources for Health, hosted again at the Citigroup Center.
Last year’s conference laid the ground-work for a pro bono study conducted by McKinsey & Company to help develop our long-term strategy. The purpose of this symposium was to relay the McKinsey team’s findings and discuss our strategic plan.
Some sixty participants from the global public health community, academia, the nonprofit world, and government agencies convened to discuss the critical shortage of healthcare workers in the developing world, using Tanzania and our work at Bugando as a case study for a discussion about accelerating training.
Laurie Garrett of the Council of Foreign Relations presented on the linkages between the HIV epidemic and the global shortage of healthcare workers. ‘We don’t have an HIV crisis: we have a health worker crisis that will be sustained, no matter what we do, for twenty years,’ she said. Francis Omaswa spoke about the creation of a new Global Health Workforce Alliance, a partnership dedicated to identifying and implementing solutions to the health workforce crisis.
Touch president Lowell Bryan then shared the McKinsey findings in the context of our refined strategy for training healthcare workers in Tanzania. ‘The essence of our vision is to focus on expanding BUCHS to ensure it becomes a center of excellence for health worker training for all of East Africa, building new schools, and assisting other existing schools to grow to full capacity’. The report will be formally released in early July.
Mid-afternoon, the participants split into five breakout groups to discuss the key assertions in the report and Touch’s plan going forward. The central topics for discussion were that:
- training skilled healthcare workers in the developing world is the most important lever in the global effort to improve healthcare outcomes
- training higher-skilled cadres of HRH should be the first priority for sustained impact
- addressing the HRH shortage will take many years and sustained funding
- management capacity is the most critical bottleneck to increasing training capacity, and
- funding good jobs is essential for better HRH impact.
After reconvening in plenary session to present the key takeaways of each group, we shifted gears to enjoy cocktails with special guests Joan and Sandy Weill. We would like to thank everyone who attended the symposium for your insights regarding our strategy and its implementation, and we value your continued input.