Private Health Sector Human Resources of Health (HRH) Challenges

Private Health Sector Human Resources of Health (HRH) Challenges

- Poor performance of health workers arising from

      -     Inadequate training of private health workers

      -      Lack of Continuing Medical Education opportunities

-    Lack of refresher courses and refresher workshops as most programs are organized by government and private health workers are rarely considered or invited.

-    There are challenges in recruiting, retention and management of health workers especially in rural areas.

-    It’s hard to recruit in private practice due to poor wages,

-    It’s hard to retain health workers and migration of health workers is very high.

-     Poor management structures in most of private health centers leading to poor human resource management.

-    Private Health workers are not always formally updated on different treatment guidelines and policies.

-    Inadequate health workers

-    Multiple tasking and inappropriate shifting of tasks to private health workers, whereby a health may perform the work of dentist and at the same time a pediatrician in the same facility.

-    No or Poor retirement benefits / pension benefits for private health workers or social insurance.

-    Poor referral network among private health workers and poor networking among private health workers.

-    Poor working conditions like working till late, no appropriate shifts, no consideration for overtime, workload etc

-    Poor equipped private health workers with the necessary equipments sometimes leads to poor performance of a private health workers and poor quality of care.

-    Poor knowledge or lack of codes of ethics by private health workers

-    Poor customer handling of private health consumers by private health workers

-    Poor handling of consumer complaints by private health workers

-    Little knowledge of health related laws and rights by private health workers and low sensitization on consumer health rights.

-      Lack of private health workers HIV/AIDS policy especially in the PFP subsector.

-      HIV/AIDS, some workers have been invaded with the disease resulting to shortage of health workers.

-      NGOs are keeping the private health workers industry unstable whereby a health professional may leave his private health clinic for some time to go serve a 6 months or one year project somewhere.

-      There is inadequate and fragmented regulation of private health workers and i.e different uncoordinated medical councils.

-      Poor record keeping skills of private health workers leading to poor health HMIS.

-      Poor research management knowledge of private health workers yet most of them manage their health facilities directly without delegation of responsibility professional managers regardless of scale of facility.

-      Poor research skills.

-    Absenteeism and Multiple deployments in different health facilities 

-    Poor compliance to patient safety ethics, guidelines and rights.

-    Poor job descriptions  and service description in private health settings

-          etc