Another Season of Graduation

June and July are usually months of graduation in Ethiopia. The 2005 EC (2013 GC) graduation season for those who successfully completed kindergarten, high school, college and university is well on the go. Congratulations to the achievers, their family and the teachers!!! Several college and university graduates in various fields of study will join the work force in different sectors soon. The health sector will receive human resource for health at various levels of studies to work in different tier of the health system. Health workers are an essential part of every health care delivery system. The health workforce influences everything from the access to and quality of health services to the costs of delivering health care. The health workforce usually represents the largest and most expensive component of a health system. Ethiopia’s health workers (doctors, nurses and midwives)-to-population ratio are far below the World Health Organization recommended minimum threshold of 2.3 per 1000 population. This is even worse for higher level health workers. As a result, infant mortality, under five mortality and maternal mortality rates are still high though tremendous improvement is demonstrated. It is known as there is a positive correlation between health worker-to-population ratios and infant, child and maternal survival rates. In the past one decade, Ethiopia invested a lot to meet its human resource for health need by designing a strategy to ensure both the availability of quality care and the retention and deployment of skilled and appropriate health workers, particularly in rural and remote settings. As a result it has achieved the low level work force, almost achieving the middle level and vigorously working to meet the high level health work forces. This year, seven of the public and one of the private medical schools graduate their students putting over eight hundred medical doctors in to the health system. By rough calculation, each of the nearly two hundred hospitals in the country will get at least additional three medical doctors. In line with production health workforce, Ethiopia is required to work on creation of strong health system that can respond to the inequitable distribution and inefficiency.