Webinar - Governance Roles and Capacities of Ministries of Health Framework: Part 1 - A Practitioner's Perspective

Background

The Health Systems Governance Collaborative, the Alliance for Health Policy & Systems Research and the UHC Partnership are hosting a webinar series around the launch of their Working Paper: Addressing Governance Challenges and Capacities in Ministries of Health. This was the first session of the series, examining the working paper with a practitioner's lens.
 
The Working Paper aims to inform current and future efforts to strengthen governance capacities in Ministries of Health (MoHs) across the world. In their pursuit of ensuring and promoting health and wellness for their populations, MoHs are responsible for a complex array of governance roles and must implement these roles against a rapidly changing and often volatile political, financial, ecological and health-related context. Despite growing attention to the issue of health sector governance – in LMICs and elsewhere – there has to date been little attention devoted to the capacities of Ministries to actually undertake their governance roles. In focusing on four major dimensions of governance – performing de jure governance roles, preparing for and responding to changing contexts, managing stakeholder relationships and managing values – this Working Paper explores individual and organizational competencies, with the overall system's capacities requiring greater attention in further research.
 
With attention to six relevant categories of governance capacity – structural, role, personal, workload, performance and supervisory capacity – this Working Paper examines how MoHs deal with current challenges and changes, especially political transition, crises, reforms, macroeconomic trends, global policy trends and social movements/change – along with the resulting capacity gaps that emerge.

Agenda
This webinar was introduced by Agnès Soucat and was divided into the following four sections:

1. Introducing the framework: Kabir Sheikh gave an overview of the framework on governance roles and capacities of Ministries of Health.

2. First invited response: Abdelali Belghiti Alaoui commented on the peculiarity and relevance of the framework in relation to the organization and functioning of the MOH, in particular in LMICs.
3. Second invited response: Manuel Dayrit discussed how the Philippine Department of Health has addressed governance and capacity-building through several transitions. 
4. Open Discussion

The recording of this session can be found below:

Our speakers:

Agnès Soucat

Dr Agnès Soucat MD, MPH, PhD, is the Director for Health Systems, Governance and Financing at the WHO in Geneva. Before joining WHO, she was the Global Lead: Health, Nutrition and Population for the World Bank and part of the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health. She previously was the director for Human Development for the African Development Bank, where she was responsible for health, education, and social protection for 53 African countries.

Kabir Sheikh

Professor Kabir Sheikh MBBS, MSc, PhD, is Policy Advisor at the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, WHO HQ and former Director for Research and Policy at the Public Health Foundation of India, New Delhi. He has served on several international health policy and research committees and boards and is the past Board Chair of Health Systems Global. He is an Adjunct Professor at the Public Health Foundation of India, Honorary Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and Honorary Associate Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.  

Abdelali Belghiti Alaoui

Dr. Abdelali Belghiti Alaoui MD, MPH, PhD, is a former General Secretary of the Ministry of Health of Morocco (2013-2017), and currently a Senior independent Advisor. Mr. Belghiti Alaoui is a seasoned administrator and innovative health reformer. He joined the Ministry of Health in 1986, and in the course of his career there held a range of pivotal positions, notably in the promotion of basic health coverage. He was director of hospitals and outpatient care (2003-2013), head of several healthcare commissions, and coordinated a number of public health programs. 

Manuel Dayrit

Dr. Manuel M. Dayrit MD, MSc, served as Secretary of Health (Minister) of the Philippines (2001- 2005). He started his long life in health care as a young community physician in rural Mindanao and then became disease control specialist and health promotion Director at the Department of Health. He was Director of the Department of Human Resources for Health at WHO, where in 2010 he was instrumental in drafting the WHO Code for the International Recruitment of Health Personnel. He was several years Dean of the Ateneo School of Medicine and Public Health in Manila, at which he is currently an adjunct professor.