As part of the IntraHealth-led global project CapacityPlus’s innovative workforce development strategy, the project has created a Global Advisory Board on Strengthening Medical, Nursing, and Public Health Schools in Developing Countries. The board will help to address management issues in health professional schools.

“Medical schools in poorer countries remain disproportionally weak. Their relative absence in health reform movements is increasingly unacceptable and to the detriment of poor countries’ health and economic futures,” states Dr. Ok Pannenborg, chair of the Global Advisory Board.

In the coming months, the board will guide the development of CapacityPlus’s school management tools and provide technical insight into how health educational institutions can better utilize their human, physical, and financial resources to train greater numbers of appropriately qualified health workers. This effort will include all categories of health professional schools, including medical, dental, and nursing schools as well as allied health and public health schools.

Comprised of 16 internationally recognized experts, board members come from distinguished school management, business, entrepreneurship, accreditation, and economics backgrounds. Dr. Kate Tulenko will represent CapacityPlus.

“The global health community needs to urgently support the strengthening of not only the curricula development of [health] schools, but even more so their management capacity and the ability of their deans and other senior leaders to play a prominent role in the health sector and HRH [human resources for health] reforms of their countries,” says Dr. Pannenborg.

Led by IntraHealth International, CapacityPlus is the USAID-funded global project that uniquely focuses on the health workforce needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals.