Make every mother and child count <<< World Health Day 2005

World Health Day 2006

World Health Day 2006: Working together for health

Health workers - the people who provide health care to those who need it - are the heart of health systems. But around the world, the health workforce is in crisis - a crisis to which no country is entirely immune. The results are evident: clinics with no health workers, hospitals that cannot recruit or keep key staff.

There is a chronic global shortage of health workers, as a result of decades of underinvestment in their education, training, salaries, working environment and management. This has led to a severe lack of key skills, rising levels of career switching and early retirement, as well as national and international migration.

In 2006, World Health Day (celebrated annually on 7 April), will be devoted to the health workforce crisis…

Read on: http://www.who.int/world-health-day/2006/tm_speech/en/index.html

Dr LEE Jong-wook

Director-General, WHO

World Health Day 2006 - a message from the WHO Director-General

Without a strong health workforce, advances in healthcare cannot reach and benefit the people who need them. Effective ways of preventing and treating disease require assessment, delivery and monitoring by health workers. The capacity to respond to the threat of pandemic human influenza, global efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals, and all our efforts to address priority diseases are threatened by health workforce shortages. These shortages are not limited to health practitioners, but extend to educators and trainers, managers and support staff. Poor distribution of resources, wasted and unused skills, and migration of health workers are making a bad situation worse"...

Full text of the message: http://www.who.int/world-health-day/2006/dg_message/en/index.html

KEY MESSAGES FOR WORLD HEALTH DAY 2006

Educated and well-trained health workers save lives
They are vital for providing access to disease prevention,treatment and care for all, including those living in extreme poverty.

Support and protect health workers
Safe and supportive working conditions must be ensured, and salaries, resources and management structures improved.

Enhance the effectiveness of the health workforce through new strategies
Enormous opportunities to achieve efficiency gains exist in many settings, and strategies must focus on the existing workforce because of the time lag in recruiting or training new health workers.

Tackle imbalances and inequities
There are now widening imbalances and inequities in the availability and migration of health workers that seriously undermine the provision of fair and universal health care.

Governments must take the lead
To make progress in all the above areas, governments must provide leadership in planning, formulating and implementing the required policies.

Promote partnership and cooperation
Alliances of stakeholders within countries backed by global and regional reinforcement are needed to properly address the technical and political challenges of health workforce development. Build trust among all stakeholders Trust between governments, employers, health professionals and the communities they serve must be nurtured and maintained.

Dr. Manmohan Singh

Prime Minister of India

Prime Minster Dr. Manmohan Singh launches Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI)

We need to develop a new cadre of professionals who are managers of health and not just of diseases. We have good quality human resources in the area of clinical management. But we woefully lack public health managers.

From what I see, we face a major gap in human resources in health. We have recently asked the Planning Commission to make an assessment of the scenario of human resources for health. This is important to address the wide inequalities in the provision of services within India. While states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Gujarat may have acceptable standards, there are several states in the country which do not have even the minimum number of institutions to turn out support staff for health care.

We need public health professionals equipped with expertise and managerial skills to design and deliver health programmes at the national level and down to the village level. We must also provide relevant training to enhance the capabilities of health care providers involved in public health activities.

I hope the public health professionals you train will help transform the state of our public health services. From my own personal observations, In many areas of social development, our problem is not a lack of ideas. On the contrary, institutions have failed to deliver. I therefore hope the PHFI will also invest in capacity-building in existing public health institutions across the country.

Read the full text of Prime Minister's speech at: http://pmindia.nic.in

Local Hero for Health

Dr. B S Dahiya

Ex Director General Health, Haryana

Saving the girl child: Dahiya shows the way

Ever since a judge in Palwal sentenced a doctor and his assistant to two years in prison and slapped a Rs 5,000 fine—the first conviction with a prison term under the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act—the phone has not stopped ringing at the Gurgaon home of Dr Baljit Singh Dahiya.

Because five years ago, Dahiya, who retired as Haryana Director General of Health in 2005, and a small team began a war against unscrupulous doctors in a state which today has the second lowe st sex ratio in the country.

He was the first to use in-built provisions in the Act to raid and chargesheet doctors willing to abort female foetus for a hefty fee.

Read the complete story at: http://www.indianexpress.com/story/1501.html

Information you can use:

WHO World Health Day Website

http://www.who.int/world-health-day/2006/en/index.html

World Health Report 2006

http://www.who.int/entity/whr/en/index.html

WHO-SEARO World Health Day 2006 page

http://w3.whosea.org/EN/Section260/Section2140.htm

Useful links:

The Correspondent Dialogues: Fighting TB on the front lines

Highlights and recommendations = from the Stop-TB eForum 2005