RT: Right now education is a related challenge, when you look to the future of the education system, health depends on university graduates.
SJ: Yes, building up health care human capital is a key challenge. The government continues to invest in building new hospitals and adding beds. But unless we solve the capacity issue who will operate those hospitals?
The number of graduates is not growing relative to the population growth rate and there is an urgent need for better and more highly qualified human resources to work in a complex, challenging medical environment recovering from war and sanctions.
MoH is spending on training resources but this has to be a national strategy with a planned return on investment – a train the trainer kind of a strategy – unless you want to send everyone abroad or train all the work force in country!
An additional challenge is retention, the migration of the workforce, especially the professional and trained resources continues to the developed countries and even to other countries in the region. Although this is linked to security, financial compensation is a leading factor for younger physicians’ and pharmacists’ decision to leave combined with better or more structured career development opportunities in US or UK. Right now the government has the funds, but the major loss was the skilled workforce. Once those guys leave, it is almost impossible to bring them back.
Unfortunately for the country, when I mean skilled I mean the kind of people who taught me and taught my peers and they were not even educated in Iraq. The former government invested billions sending doctors abroad to the UK, US and elsewhere. So they are all American Board certified or they have a certificate from the Royal College, so they built the medical system, so when they left there was a huge gap and then no one else replaced them who was a graduate from the UK or the US, so they were all students or those who couldn’t make it to the west for their education. So they were locally or regionally educated. So as you know that creates a big gap.
So when the government has the funds, this is one of the reasons why they cannot just improve the health care system, because just having the money is not enough, you need to have the workforce. And as you know, you cannot just build the workforce in a year or two, you need years or decades to build that.
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