The Tropical Health and Education Trust (THET) has been chosen to oversee the government’s work to enhance the quality of the healthcare workforce in Africa, the Department of Health and Social Care has announced.
The news comes after the government declared its intention to level up the healthcare workforce across Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria to bolster resilience against global health challenges.
This was announced back in May along with £15m of investment from the government’s official development assistance budget – £9m of which was ringfenced for a not-for-profit organisation to coordinate the setting up, funding and delivery of work to drive improvements in recruitment and retention of the local healthcare workforce.
The work THET will be responsible for includes:
- Linking the local African health systems with relevant UK bodies
- Promoting the sharing of best practice and skill exchanging
- Improving curriculum, regulation and guidance across the three countries
The government emphasises the significance of its work in Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria through the lens of the Covid-19 pandemic – i.e., the global health pressures which had a knock-on affect to the NHS and the 10 million shortfall of healthcare workers the World Health Organization is estimating by 2030.
Health minister, Will Quince, said in May: “The pandemic showed us that patients in the UK are not safe unless the world as a whole is resilient against health threats, and this will help us in delivering on that ambition.”
For the last 35 years, THET has been upskilling health workers across Africa and Asia in support of its core goal of enabling global access to healthcare.
Image credit: iStock
