Improving Health Worker Education in Malawi
Malawi’s vacancy rate for nursing and midwifery positions in the public sector is 65%, but producing more health workers to fill the gaps is no easy task. In the latest edition of CapacityPlus Voices, Nurses Needed: Partnering to Scale Up Health Worker Education in Malawi, Verah Nkosi shares her perspective as a nursing-midwifery student in her final year of training. Her story illustrates some common challenges for increasing the quantity and quality of graduates from health professional schools.
To move toward a more effective system of health worker training, Malawi is participating in the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI). Led by PEPFAR, NEPI is the US Government’s unified program to address the underproduction of nursing professionals in developing countries.
As a NEPI partner, CapacityPlus is surveying nursing schools in a number of countries to assess the education capacity and identify bottlenecks and gaps to increasing the number of qualified and competent graduates who will work where needed in both urban and rural settings. In addition, CapacityPlus is conducting costing studies to estimate the current unit cost of producing a nurse or midwife graduate, and to estimate the incremental additional costs of increasing the quantity and quality of the graduates.
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