65 Session of the WHO Regional Committee for Africa. N’Djamena, Chad. 23 -27 November, 2015 th
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Statement of the International Federation of Medical Students’ Associations on Global Strategy on Human Resources for Health: Perspectives from the African Region
Honourable chair, distinguished delegates, The International Federation of Medical Students’ Association (IFMSA) welcomes the discussion today on the crucial topic of the African Perspective on the GSHRH as well as the proposed actions. Reaffirming the need to ensure proper health workforce planning to ensure health workers for all and achieve health coverage throughout the region, we want to emphasize the need for safeguarding the quality of education for our future health professionals. Considering rapid scale-up and uncontrolled growth of numbers of medical faculties worldwide, the mentioned need of adding 600 additional medical and nursing schools leads us to call for urgent action towards health workforce planning taking into account not only the number of medical schools, but also the needs of the population, learning and working conditions of medical students and motives for migration, distribution of health workforce globally and in rural and urban areas, numbers of entry spots to both medical education and specialization. Most and foremost, we call for safeguarding of the quality of medical and health professions education, and for medical schools to be properly accredited according to international standards. We, the future health workforce, who will face the consequences of decisions taken today, call for collaboration between all major stakeholders, including WHO, the Association for Medical Schools in Africa and the World Federation for Medical Education, and students, to ensure the implementation of the WHO Code of Practice on HRH. We call upon all those present today, to show active leadership, to go beyond discussions of recruitment and retention, and to actively improve the learning and working conditions within their countries. We call upon those present today to go beyond the discussion of a need for scaling up the numbers of health workforce, and to actively ensure the right competencies division as well as quality of education of the health workers that are being trained. We call upon member states to, together with us, safeguard our medical education and ultimately positively impact health within our region. Thank you for your attention!