Exploring the Regulation of Task Sharing for Access to Family Planning Services in Uganda

Abstract

There is an acute shortage of Human Resources for Health in Uganda. While task sharing in the delivery of reproductive services is one of the strategies to avert this crisis, it takes place in an unregulated environment. The consequent lack of legal protection for health care providers poses a potential barrier to task sharing for both providers and the government. We show in this legal and policy review that the approach is not new in the country and that it has provisions in some policy documents. We further show the legal implications if it is rolled out in an unregulated environment and propose six options to guide regulation. These include enforcing the Health Service Commission Act, utilizing the mandate of the Director General to authorize treatment, amending the regulations of health professional regulatory bodies, developing regulation to support implementation of the acts for health professionals, developing a full act of parliament, and enacting ordinances at the district level.

Scaling Up Access to Implants: A Summative Evaluation of the Implants Access Program

“…Uganda has supported task sharing to allow nurses and midwives to perform insertions in policy documents, but they do not yet have legal protection to do so. 18 In 2014, Nigeria successfully approved a task shifting policy allowing community health extension workers (CHEWs) to insert and remove implants. The current status of national scale-up efforts to train CHEWs in implants insertions and removals in Nigeria could not be confirmed for this evaluation.…”