All Health Center II level facilities are headed by nurses and on a few occasions; midwives. Health Center III are have one clinician (In-charge) and the rest are nurses and a midwife or two while Health Center IV may have one doctor and/or one clinician, nurses and/or a midwife or two. The nurses are the backbone of the health care system yet they are barely facilitated. Their salaries are extremely (some are paid as low as approximately 150 dollars a month), have no access to housing services and their facilities never receive adequate medical supplies like drugs and protective ware.
While the Health Systems Strengthening projects have been rolled out in the country with support from USAID, such projects don't support housing and salary related aspects of the health care system. While facilities may have better infrastructure, better management systems, improved supply chain systems etc, nurses are still poorly paid and facilitated to do their work. Consequently challenges like health worker absenteeism, inability to provide services at night, negative health workers' attitude towards patients, limited access medical supplies etc are not addressed.
Its therefore clear that we can't strengthen systems without addressing challenges experienced by health workers for there is no health system without health workers especially nurses.
HIFA profile: Immaculate Nakityo Lwanga is a Project Manager/Administrator at Makerere University College of Health Sciences, Uganda. She is interested in working with projects/programmes on HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, Health Systems Strengthening, socio-economic empowerment for vulnerable populations, Gender and women and Orphans and other Vulnerable children. Such programmes may focus on awareness and education, capacity building, direct service delivery and/or research. She is a member of the HIFA mHEALTH-INNOVATE working group, which is supporting the HIFA members to explore the question: What can we learn from health workers' informal use of mobile phones? https://www.hifa.org/support/members/immaculate-nakityo
https://www.hifa.org/projects/mhealth-innovate-what-can-we-learn-health-...
immacn AT yahoo.com
