President William Ruto has announced the formation of a Presidential Taskforce on Addressing Human Resources for Health.
The initiative, detailed in Executive Order No. 5 of 2024, aims to address the chronic understaffing in the country’s medical facilities and improve the management of healthcare personnel.
The taskforce, chaired by Professor Khama Rogo, has been given a broad mandate to review and recommend reforms in the legal, policy, administrative, and operational frameworks governing human resources in the health sector.
“Strengthening the health workforce through policy, adequate financing, planning, recruitment, training, deployment and retention is paramount to ensuring everyone has access to a qualified health worker,” the executive order states, underscoring the urgency of the situation.
A key objective of the taskforce is to advise on the framework for employing an additional 20,000 healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, and clinical officers. This ambitious target is set against the backdrop of the WHO’s recommendation of 23 healthcare workers per 10,000 population, a benchmark Kenya currently falls short of.
The initiative comes at a critical time for Kenya’s health sector, which has been grappling with the challenges of a devolved system. The executive order acknowledges that while devolution has brought services closer to the people, it has also led to “fragmentation and a disconnect in the management of health services and personnel.”
The taskforce has been given a six-month timeline to complete its work, with the possibility of extension.
