The Ministry of Health (MOH) and its implementing partners e.g. UNFPA, introduced the Health Personnel Education (HPE) programme in 2019. The Republic of South Sudan faces many health challenges including high rates of infant and maternal deaths, malnutrition, communicable and non-communicable diseases. The goal of health policy is to have a strengthened national health system that overcomes barriers to effective delivery of the Basic Package of Health and Nutrition Services.
One of the strategies for achieving the health policy goals is to ensure that the health institutions have adequate staff, equitably distributed in the country, and are well motivated. However, with about over 80-trained tutors, the country still faces a shortage of trained health workers of all cadres. This is a significant obstacle towards achieving national health goals. To offset the human resources for health gap, the country envisages increasing production of health workforce through, among other things, strengthening the capacity of the existing Health Sciences Institutes, establishing new training institutions, establishing new training programmes and having adequate tutors in the training institutions who have appropriate knowledge, skills, and attitudes in teaching health professionals.
This programme aims at preparing tutors who are competent in teaching, assessing students’ performance, designing and reviewing curriculum, developing learning materials, conducting educational research, as well as managing educational programmes and health training institutions. It is a multi-disciplinary and gender-sensitive programme, which will recruit tutors from all health-related disciplines in the Health Sciences Institutes. The programme comprises of 13 modules spread over one academic year of two semesters; each semester having 22 weeks.
Since 2019, The HPE (Tutorship) programme has so far trained 85 tutors in five different batches from across all the HSIs in South Sudan.
