The inaugural Health Workforce Conference 2022 was a major milestone towards realization of health care reforms aimed at strengthening technical and soft skill competencies. The conference whose theme was ‘Repositioning today’s health workforce for the future’ focused on strengthening the technical and soft skill competencies and enhancing the global competitiveness and future job readiness of health professionals. It also focused on ensuring adequate response to the Country’s changing healthcare needs and strengthening capability and technical support from health professionals for the Universal Health Coverage (UHC) agenda.

KMPDC played a key role as the secretariat to the conference with its Chair Dr Eva Njenga serving as the conference Co-Chair and CEO Daniel Yumbya as the head of the Secretariat. The conference which ran from the 7th to 9th of February 2022 attracted over 1,000 local and international delegates. After three-days of deliberations, the following resolutions which are expected bring transformative change to the health sector were made:

• The need to revise curricular of training the health workforce with a view to enrich it with skills based training and other competencies including specialist training to enhance patient centered care.

• Better harmonization in training amongst training institutions and promotion of affordable training through establishment of a training fund and medical education fund for teaching hospitals to fund trainees.

• Development of a comprehensive integrated health workforce information system and institutionalization of HRH tools such as Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) and Health Labour Market Analysis (HLMA). This will enable evidence decision making so as to effectively manage the human resource for health labour market.

• Streamlining the supply and demand of health workforce in the labour market for quality healthcare through guidelines on absorption, specialist training, retention of medical graduates and migration of health workers.

• The need for collaboration between universities and tertiary hospitals which are uniquely placed to support and prioritize research and implement research findings to improve patient outcomes.

• Development of a regulatory framework and standards to guide task sharing and common learner based curricular.

• Standardization and harmonization of scopes of practice for all cadres of health workers to match health professional competencies aligned to career progression pathways.

To ensure implementation of the conference resolutions, it was recommended that a Standing Implementation Oversight Committee (SIOC) be established.