CapacityPlus Joins the Private Sector Working Group

As part of CapacityPlus’s commitment to advancing private-sector solutions for human resources for health, in October we joined the newly relaunched Private Sector Working Group (PSWG). This is a broad-based forum comprised of USAID, its implementing partners, and a number of other multilaterals and foundations such as the World Bank, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation.

PSWG’s new role
With the growing role of the private sector in health and enlargement of the membership base, the PSWG is indeed challenged with a number of critical issues concerning expectation management and prioritization of activities. In the October 26 meeting participants asked:

• What private sector engagements should PSWG focus on in the future—the not-for-profit private sector, commercial private sector, or both?

• Which topics and issues are most relevant for the PSWG to address, based on the programmatic priorities of the health sector in developing countries as well as the scope of the group?

• What are the best activities for the PSWG to pursue to most successfully contribute to its above-mentioned goals?

PSWG members will have the opportunity to voice their ideas on these and other questions in an upcoming online survey.

Beyond service delivery and medical supplies
Thus far, the PSWG has focused on service delivery and medical supplies. It’s also important that the role of the private sector in other elements of the health system be properly assessed and supported. For example, the 57 countries named by the WHO that are experiencing acute health workforce shortages require a massive investment in the production of health professionals. Without the private sector’s complementary participation, it will be impossible for the public sector alone to meet the targets in many of these countries.

The private sector, as a matter of fact, is already active in the fields of preservice medical and nursing education in a number of developing countries, including India, Nigeria, Malawi, and Zambia, where it trains a significant portion of the nurses. In Ethiopia, private nursing schools are credited with greatly reducing the country’s nursing shortage. A recent Gates-funded Sub-Saharan African Medical Schools Study revealed that private medical schools represent the fastest growing segment of African medical schools.

CapacityPlus and the private sector
With ample experience to draw from, CapacityPlus recommended that the PSWG include these missing links in its agenda, and looks forward to contributing to issues surrounding the private sector’s role in human resources for health.

CapacityPlus’s own work includes innovative financing of preservice education. We are also collaborating with the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation to evaluate the business models of highly successful nongovernmental health professional schools. Best practices identified through this work will then be made available to public health professional schools to implement, in order to increase the quality and number of graduates. In addition, as part of CapacityPlus’s strategy for scaling up global health workforce production, we will be creating tools to evaluate and improve the management efficiency of health professional schools.

Using these private sector-inspired tools, health professional schools can improve their production functions and graduate more high-quality health workers with their existing resources.