$7m to address Tanzania healthworker shortages

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given a $7.5 million grant to Tanzania’s Muhimbili University of Health Allied Sciences and the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Global Health Sciences Department to address the lack of personnel in the country’s health sector.

Through the collaboration, Muhimbili and other African institutions will be able to devise strategies to address their countries’ health workforce needs.

The grant will be given over two years to develop the partnership between the two institutions, gather supportive information, and preliminary data to inform a long-term, sustainable partnership for addressing the health workforce crisis.

The joint programme is led by UCSF’s Global Health Sciences director of programme planning and development Prof Sarah Macfarlane and Muhimbili director for continuing education and professional development Prof Ephata Kaaya.

According to Prof Macfarlane, the programme’s activities will be evaluated for relevance and effectiveness while the partnership itself will be subject to ongoing critical analysis and review.

Solving sub-Saharan Africa’s healthcare worker shortage has long been a priority for governments, universities and international organisations, according to the collaborators.

The project is expected to harness the resources of the two major universities to approach the problem and aims to develop an institutional partnership model that can be replicated in other low-resource settings.

Muhimbili will recruit and train faculty, strengthen the academic environment for education and research, and revise undergraduate and post-graduate curricula in order to increase its output of health professionals to serve the needs of the country,” said Muhimbili Vice Chancellor, Prof Kisali Pallangyo.

Faculty from the UCSF Schools of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy and Dentistry will work with their Muhimbili counterparts, as well as the Muhimbili School of Public Health, to share curricula and educational technologies, and develop collaborative research programmes.

UCSF Global Health Sciences executive director Haile Debas said the UCSF and Muhimbili fit the programme as both are public health sciences institutions that train physicians, nurses, pharmacists, dentists and other health workers.

The two institutions have worked together for four years.