Cocreation in Health Workforce Planning to Shape the Future of the Health Care System in the Philippines

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic presented strategic opportunities to strengthen national health workforce planning to shape future health care systems that are responsive both during normal times and during crises.n We describe our health workforce planning process based on a cocreation model that built a relationship between researchers and policy makers to coproduce recommendations to strengthen primary care and advance universal health coverage in the Philippines. nWe applied 2 approaches to project the future supply of 10 selected health professions and estimated the demand for primary care services at national and subnational levels; our analysis provided spaces for policy recommendations on issues related to health workforce quantity, skill mix, and distribution.

Are Sustainable Health Workforces Possible? Issues and a Possible Remedy

“…Backcasting enables countries with national health strategies to envisage this normative future and to look backwards to be able to see how this future was achieved. As a technique, it is not commonly used in health policy development [68], but as indicated above, the appreciation and advocacy of the use of such complementary planning and policy development techniques in health workforce and wider public policy is increasing [57,[59][60][61][62][63].…”

“…As Dunn [57] presents, while forecasting can be improved in terms of error reduction or forecast efficacy, better results can be achieved with a mix of theoretical models and expert judgements than by extrapolative forecasts alone. As such, an appreciation and the use of different forecasting or future preparation methods is advocated to complement the health workforce planning's present techniques [58,59] and in wider public policy development [57,[60][61][62][63].…”

The Integration of Primary Care and Public Health in Medical Students’ Training Based on Social Accountability and Community-Engaged Medical Education

“…Typically, the final year is dedicated to clinical training in hospital settings with at most 2 months dedicated to service in communities. The conventional medical education system has inadvertently influenced more physicians to serve in hospitals in urban settings, resulting in an inequitable health workforce distribution that adversely affects rural areas with less health workers [ 7 ]. More physicians also choose to train to become specialists rather than practice as primary care providers, which has led to calls to reorient health professionals’ education in the Philippines towards Primary Healthcare [ 8 ] as emphasized in the country’s Universal Healthcare (UHC) law [ 9 ].…”