Task Shifting Essay

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Due to a shortage of professional health workers in developing countries, the new effective strategy of task shifting is beneficial in which community or lay health workers (may be oversight from professional health-care practitioners) provide ‘front-line’ healthcare, instead of physicians and trained nurses [7]. The diseases which have chronic conditions, including infection with the HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) or AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome) [8-9], diabetes mellitus [10] and some mental disorders.[11-15] need special care for long duration and hence require more attention from phy¬sicians and trained nurses. Task shifting is already being implemented as a pragmatic response to health workforce shortages to various degrees …show more content…

(2009) [19] argued that, while task shifting holds great promise, any long-term success of task shifting hinges on serious political and financial commitments. For effective implementation, task shifting requires a comprehensive and integrated reconfiguration of health teams, changed scopes of practice and regulatory frameworks and enhanced training infrastructure, as well as the availability of reliable medium- to long-term funding, with time frames of 20 to 30 years instead of three to five years. The concept and practice of community participation need to be revisited. They also argued that task shifting strategies require leadership from national governments to ensure supporting regulatory framework, regulating the implementation of enabling policies, support and guide training institutions, and ensure adequate resources, and using the support of the multiple stakeholders. With such willingness, attitude, and leadership to learn from those with relevant experience (for example, various countries from Africa like Brazil, Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia), task shifting can make a vital contribution to building cost-effective, balanced, sustainable, and equitable health care systems. They also suggested that any serious commitment to task shifting requires leadership from country governments. The country government's role is to ensure an enabling policy, regulatory framework, and credentialing system, to accelerate the implementation of relevant policies and to provide required resources, guide and support training institutions to not only upgrade current training but also ensure appropriate initial and continuing education (integrated, multidisciplinary, community- and

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