Maintaining human resources within the health system and ensuring that skilled people are in the right place were important to strengthening this vital sector, says World Health Organization representative to the South Pacific Dr Mark Jacobs.

Attending the 14th Pacific Heads of Health meeting in Nadi this week, Dr Jacobs said those were among the challenges being faced by the region’s health systems.

“Some of the key challenges that we’ll be discussing at this meeting and also Pacific health ministers will be discussing and deciding on are things like human resources of our health staff across the Pacific,” he said.

“Whether we have enough, whether they have enough skills and whether they’re in the right places.”

According to a report presented at the meeting on Rethinking Human Resources for Health, Pacific Island Countries generally continued to face persistent challenges related to availability, accessibility and quality of health workers especially at the primary care level.

The report revealed that this has been exacerbated by a flood of outmigration of qualified workers.

“Challenges arise from constrained training capacity due to inadequate teaching and learning resources, the rapid ageing of the existing workforce, skills mix mismatch, mobility, limited absorption capacity for additional workforce by service providers and health worker burnout,” the report said.

Dr Jacobs said the region’s health systems needed to be more resilient in the face of the many challenges they faced.

This resilience, he said, included being able to cope with the pressure from cyclones and tsunamis.

As a result, Dr Jacobs said, health systems would be able to provide quality healthcare services.