Health Professional Regulation in Africa

The Commonwealth Secretariat contracted Allen + Clarke to work with five countries in Eastern and Southern Africa to review their systems for regulating health professionals and to provide advice on means to strengthen such systems.

The project started with a review of international best practice models of professional regulations looking at recent developments across Africa and also other countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. A key step of our work was to consider whether there was actually justifiable need for government intervention in the sector, and if so, what were the range of regulatory and non regulatory options for intervention.  That is, we felt it was important not to leap straight at a regulatory solution.  An integral part of our work therefore involved applying a sound framework for enabling good regulatory decision making, and closely engaging stakeholders with the framework to ensure people had an open mind.

While our work looked at current models in 14 countries in the region, we visited five countries: Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Zambia, and Kenya.  In each country we worked closely with government and non government stakeholders to ensure we developed a clear understanding of the problems and issues each country was facing.  This process clearly highlighted that while there were some common challenges across the region, each country was facing its own unique set of issues – so a 'one size fits all' solution was not the answer.

We presented our final report to the Commonwealth Regional Health Community Secretariat and the 14 countries in the region and also developed materials for a meeting of Health Ministers in the region.  Our report made clear and practical recommendations on appropriate models for regulating health professionals.  Our recommendations were based on our foundation analysis of a suite of potential models, which could be viably used in countries.

Part of our brief also involved developing model legislative provisions, which could be adapted for any new law enacted by countries to regulate allied health professionals.