On August 4, Gia Lai Provincial People's Committee said that it had a report on resolving voters' petitions on ensuring medical personnel at commune-level health stations in the context of implementing the 2-level local government model.
Voters worry about shortage of grassroots healthcare personnel
According to voters' reflections, it is necessary to ensure sufficient number of employees, reasonable job title structure, and human resource allocation suitable to regional characteristics and population size.
At the same time, it is necessary to improve the quality of staff so that commune-level health stations can effectively perform the tasks of health care, medical examination and treatment, preventive medicine, population, food safety, health education communication and grassroots health programs.
Voters also believe that the major difficulty currently is determining the legal position, organizational model, financial mechanism, job position and conditions to ensure that commune-level health stations operate stably according to the model of public non-business units directly under the commune-level People's Committee.
Before this proposal, Gia Lai Department of Health has comprehensively reviewed and summarized the current situation of grassroots health personnel before and after implementing the 2-level local government model.
The results show that before arranging administrative units, the whole province had 373 commune-level Health Stations with 2,262 personnel.
After implementing the new model, the whole province still has 135 commune-level Health Stations, managing 369 station points, with 2,346 existing personnel, reaching about 82.6% compared to the assigned staffing (2,840 people), and still lacking 494 personnel.
The current human resource structure includes 282 doctors, 497 medical assistants, 547 nurses, 343 midwives, 265 pharmacists, 95 public health personnel, 299 population members and 18 other personnel.
In addition, the whole province has 1,648 village and hamlet health workers and 3,185 population collaborators participating in supporting community health activities, communication, epidemic prevention, population work and primary health care.
According to statistics, 131/135 Health Stations have doctors working on the spot, reaching about 97%; and 4 stations do not have doctors yet. There are 112/135 Health Stations lacking personnel compared to the assigned number, only 23 stations ensure sufficient personnel.
Prioritize supplementing doctors for difficult areas
According to Gia Lai Provincial People's Committee, the rearrangement of the network of Health Stations according to new administrative units has contributed to streamlining focal points, increasing the average scale of personnel and the number of doctors at each station.
However, the population size served by each Health Station has increased significantly, the management area is wider, and many stations have to be in charge of many health points. Meanwhile, the workload also arises with additional tasks such as managing people's health, digital transformation, statistical reporting, and maintaining operations at health points...
Therefore, if only based on the number of health stations after arrangement to determine human resource needs, it will not fully reflect the actual workload of grassroots healthcare.
To overcome the shortage and imbalance of human resources, the Provincial People's Committee has directed to prioritize supplementing human resources for health stations that do not have doctors, only have 1 doctor or manage many health points, large areas, densely populated areas, remote and isolated areas, ethnic minority areas and difficult areas.
Gia Lai Provincial People's Committee said that, up to now, voters' recommendations on the number, structure, quality and distribution of human resources have been initially resolved through reviewing, standardizing data, recruiting additional personnel, rearranging human resources after arrangement and deploying doctor rotation.
However, due to the still large shortage of human resources, the job title structure is not uniform between localities; many health stations still lack doctors, pharmacists, midwives, public health human resources, population and support human resources. Along with that, the current human resource norms have not kept up with the requirements for operating health stations in the 2-level local government model, so the resolution of voters' petitions is still being continued.
