Abstract
Following the Ebola crisis in Liberia in 2014–15, the Liberian Ministry of Health developed a strategy to build a fit-for-purpose health workforce, focusing on both health care providers and health managers. To help fulfill national capacity-building goals for health management, a team of faculty, staff, and practitioners from the Yale School of Medicine, the University of Liberia, the National Public Health Institute of Liberia, and the Ministry of Health collaboratively developed and launched the health management program in Liberia in July 2017. The team worked to build specific management and leadership competencies for healthcare workers serving in management and leadership roles in Liberia’s health sector using two concurrent strategies—1) implementation of a hospital-based partnership-mentorship model in the two largest hospitals in the capital city of Monrovia, and 2) establishment of an executive education-style advanced Certificate in Health Systems Leadership and Management at the University of Liberia. Here we describe the health management program in Liberia, its focus, and its evolution from program launch in 2017 to the present, as well as ongoing efforts to transition program activities to local partner ownership by the end of 2021.
Highlights
The Government of Liberia articulated a strategy for building a resilient health system post-Ebola that included a fit-for-purpose health workforce focused on five priority cadres: physicians, nurses, midwives, community health workers, and health managers
Since the inception of the health management program in July 2017, a major goal has been gradual transfer of ownership and implementation responsibility for program activities, both health management capacity-building within the two major hospitals as well as the Certificate in Health Systems Leadership and Management (CHSLM) at UL, to local partners and institutions
All components of the program were designed to enable transfer of health management capacitybuilding activities to local ownership within the five-year Resilient and Responsive Health Systems Initiative (RRHS) program period, and the program is on track to meet these goals
Summary
The overall effectiveness of the health management program approach, is illustrated by the fact that health management teams at both hospitals have developed their own QI projects, along with plans to track progress, and are implementing those projects without foreign technical assistance This indicates success in the overarching goal of the hospital-based partnership-mentorship model: to build the capacity of local health managers to identify management-related challenges, utilize strategic problem-solving strategies to develop solutions (often in the form of focused QI projects), and implement those projects, recognizing that sometimes the desired project outcome will not be achieved, but that the team will learn and improve in health management skills and competencies for long-term, system-level impact.
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