Health managers get training on how to assess staff workload |16 May 2017

Senior managers from the Ministry of Health comprising health managers, senior doctors , senior laboratory technologists, chief pharmacists, nurse coordinators from Praslin and La Digue are attending a five-day workshop on ‘Applying Workload Indicators of Staffing Need’ (WISN).

This is to assess the work load of staff in health facilities across the country.

Delegates are people from top management level who will be more involved in decision-making and who will determine the standard which will make them understand the evidence-based rather than somebody saying they have too much work to do which the tool of WISN will tell you whether this is true or not.

WISN will assist the human resources section in assessing how much will be the optimal staff required and what is the optimal working hours required.

The workshop is being facilitated by Dr Magda Hilda Awases of WHO, who is the Focal Point Human Resources for Health Programme based in Zimbabwe, and Maritza Titus, HRH Technical Advisor of IntraHealth of Namibia.

The workshop was officially opened yesterday by Dr Bernard Valentin, the principal secretary for health, in the presence of the Minister for Health, Jean-Paul Adam, and Dr Bhupinder Aulakh, WHO Liaison Officer for Seychelles.

“For a long time, we’ve been saying that our human resource is our most important asset. Believe it or not, this is etched deeply in our psyche and, as an organisation, as much as we can, we try to demonstrate it.  We invest heavily in training and retraining.

“Our new national strategic plan puts a lot of emphasis on human resource. Not surprisingly, as human resource is one of the pillars, one of the building blocks, the bedrock even, of our health system. 

“But our strategic plan also outlines a whole range of outstanding issues or weaknesses which the Ministry of Health needs to address in the planning and management of its human resource. One of those issues is that in Seychelles we do not adequately practice ‘needs based human resource projection and planning’. The argument is that if this was the case, we would be able to more effectively address the gaps in key skills needed to provide essential health services,” said Dr Valentin in his opening address.

And, he said, to achieve all these, the ministry needs a different approach at planning and managing its human resources.  And this is where the WISN training comes in where WISN should be able to provide the ministry with the evidence necessary for it to begin perhaps a totally different discourse, in the area of employee training or retraining; time management training and support; work delegation and re-allocation; job description revision and workload adjustment to name some.

“It is to find out if health facilities are over-staffed or under-staffed. Are they under-worked or over-worked. Or if they need to tasked-shift certain categories of work can be performed rather by two people than by one person. Or let’s say a person from a facility has too many people and the other facility needs more people. So you can shift these people from here to there. So it helps you to understand what a rational manpower distribution should be,” explained Dr Aulakh.

WISN is a facility-based method using a health worker’s workload and activity (time) standards to determine staff movements. It takes into account differences in services provided and the complexity of care in different facilities. The WISN calculation of staff requirements is based on the same medical standards in all similar fields. Among its many uses it helps in determining how best to improve current staffing situation; best way to allocate new functions and transfer existing functions to different health worker categories; it is based on current professional standards for performing a particular component of work; it can be used to plan future staffing of health facilities and to examine the impact of different conditions of employment on staff requirements. It includes changes in the length of the working week, increased vacation or different in-service training policies, for example.