Making sense: AIDS and the Health Workforce in Africa
"Our ambition is then not to present a state of the art, but rather to offer some other ways of looking at the dynamic interplay between the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the health workforce in the hope that this may lead to better insights in the complexity and diversity of these problems." ( A publication of Medicus Mundi International, Brussels, 2005)
The health workforce has made its comeback on the agenda, as witnessed by a recent flurry of reports that deal with the crisis of the human resources for health. One stream explores the human resource bottlenecks for the new global health initiatives and the rapid scaling up of ART and the effects of the pandemic on the health workforce. Another stream focuses on the brain drain, while a third stream presents global overviews of the factors that underlie the ‘crisis’.
If anything, this ‘new’ attention to the health workforce shows that both the world of research and international development has taken up the issue of human resources. It seems that a certain momentum is being created that may set in motion interesting initiatives and changes. The issues underlying the problems of the health workforce are, however, many and finely intertwined, leading to a high degree of complexity and wickedness.
The two-way interaction between the health workforce and HIV/AIDS is a prime example and it is the main subject of this report, which was commissioned by Medicus Mundi International.(2005)