Project News

The project organized two online side meetings of Prince Mahidol Award Conference (PMAC) 2022. The first side meeting "Where is our doctor? Measures for the future distribution of health workforce" was held on 20 December 2021. It was hosted by the project (Ministry of Public Health (MOPH), National Health Security Office (NHSO), Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)), Asia Pacific Action Alliance on Human Resources for Health (AAAH) and International Health Policy Program (IHPP).

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) realizes that achieving Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in target 3.8 is one of the common goals to establish sustainable society in the world. In the pursuit of UHC, access to health workforce is inevitable. The distribution of health workforce is directly linked to the access to health care, especially in rural areas. In addition, the lack of access to health services causes migration from rural areas to urban areas and leads to inequality of health and economic status in terms of UHC. The government of every country should take measures to improve the distribution of health workforce considering the demographic movements including ageing, urbanization, and migration.

In the side meeting, speakers from four countries, Bhutan, Lao PDR, Thailand and Japan, presented the situation of health workforce distribution, effective measures being taken and challenges they are facing. Thailand presented about an ongoing pilot project of developing electronic platform for data sharing between the MOPH and health professional councils to build an inclusive health workforce registry system. Lao PDR shared the history of interventions to improve the distribution of its health workforce. One of the country's significant interventions was the "clinical health worker allocation in health center" policy. Bhutan faces the shortage of health workforce, but the country is putting a great effort in improving the distribution by implementing approaches such as posting physicians or care coordination teams at primary health centers. Japan shared about the registration system of physicians and how the data provided from the system is being used to take evidence-based measures on the training process for improving the distribution of physicians.

The commentators and the chair provided reflections which invited all the participants to deepen their understandings and realize the importance of taking actions to move the agenda forward. As one of the commentators stated, there is no single solution, we need coordinated policy interventions along each country's context. In that sense, the side meeting succeeded to share various measures being taken in various context and considered the key points of coordinated policy interventions.

We would like to thank all the participants, panelists and organizers for joining and supporting this side meeting, and we also would like to express our sincere gratitude to the PMAC Secretariat for providing us the opportunity to connect with people from all over the world.

You can watch the video recording on the PMAC 2022 website:

• https://pmac2022.com/activity/15/sidemeetingOnline/detail (external link)