SUMMARY: The objective of this activity is to strengthen the capacity of the Ministry of Health's (MOH)

National AIDS Coordinating Unit (UCC) to develop a human resources strategic plan. This will entail an

initial health workforce human capacity assessment in HIV/AIDS and then support to the MOH to plan

interventions to address the assessment recommendations.

BACKGROUND: Currently, the MOH and related ministries charged with working in HIV/AIDS at both the

service delivery level as well as the administrative and management levels have stretched human resource

capacity. Despite Government of Haiti (GOH) commitment to increasing the public health workforce, there is

substantial variation in the degree to which public health positions are available throughout the system,

particularly at the departmental and sub-departmental levels. Moreover, those few health professionals that

are available are responsible for providing a range of public health services, including tuberculosis, malaria

and HIV/AIDS. This need has been exacerbated by the increase in HIV/AIDS funding to Haiti over the past

five years, first with substantial Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria grants and then with

the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) funds that brought changes in national policies,

including the provision of free care and treatment services for HIV patients. Consequently, patient loads

and demand for treatment, counseling and testing, care and prevention services in clinics and hospitals

around the country have increased substantially. Given that the government ministries, including MOH and

Ministry of Social Welfare, are the most inherently sustainable structures to implement HIV/AIDS programs

for the long term, it is important to ensure that the PEPFAR program does not inadvertently compromise this

attempt to reach sustainability.

In the medium-term, the GOH will need to increase staffing levels and strengthen human capacity in the

areas of basic public health sciences, analytical assessment, policy development, program planning,

communication, financial and program management, leadership, and community development to adjust the

structure of the health care system to address HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment. In the short-term,

in addition to the proposed assessment, PEPFAR will support strategies to allow quality program expansion

to take place, including formulation of a short and long term human capacity development strategy, hiring

temporary contract staff, providing targeted incentives (e.g. improved working infrastructure, access to state

-of-the art technical updates through the internet), supporting pre-service and in-service training and funding

overtime.

ACTIVITY:

In consultation with the OGAC human capacity technical working group, Fiscal Year 2008 funds will support

the Government of Haiti (GOH) to conduct a health workforce human capacity assessment to identify the

human resources needed to achieve HIV/AIDS prevention, care, and treatment goals, to document the gaps

in resources which cannot be realigned from the overall workforce and to determine how to identify, train,

and sustain health workers engaged in HIV/AIDS services without compromising the budget or manpower

for other health services.