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of issues within constrained resources. The senior officials in the MOH mainly come from medical
backgrounds and there is a lack of senior level staff from other relevant backgrounds that could
contribute to policy, planning and other areas of work, such as economics, finance, general
management, social science and other areas of expertise.
A DIFD project supported management training in 2005-2007 through the UK National School of
Government for around 100 managers, however apparently not many of these trainees hold
management positions in the health sector. Also few of the 100 or so students who entered the
Masters in Health Management at Prishtina University have management positions in the health
sector. The barriers to this need to be considered.
The World Bank has provided management training in the form of short courses which have been
commented on positively by the staff who attended. The World Bank offered to provide resources for
further management training in the form of short courses but this offer was not taken up.
There may be opportunities for the MOH to make use of the services of the Kosovo Institute of Public
Administration under the Ministry of Public Services. In addition to management training, there are
many other skills that staff could benefit from being trained in, including the skills required for policy
advice, purchasing skills, and monitoring. Developing the human resources through training and
other approaches needs to be a key part of the Institutional Development Plan that follows this
functional review.
Committees and working groups issues and options
There are some formal committees including:
Board for Registration and Licensing
Board for Professional Continual Education
Central Board of Residency
Professional Ethical Board
Commission for Treatment Overseas (2)
Professional Mental Health Services Commission
This review does not cover the roles and functions of these committees in any detail as this could not
be covered within the scope of the review, however some preliminary observations have been made.
There may be opportunities to streamline the boards. The Board for Registration and Licensing has
several sub-committees dealing with various types of medical professionals and under these
subcommittees there are around 50 committees for each sub-speciality. This appears to be a large
apparatus for the registration function.
The Board for Registration and Licensing noted issues with a lack of activity and information on
continuing education, making re-registration of health officials difficult. Previous registrations are
being rolled over.
Consideration could be given to whether there are opportunities to improve the performance of the
boards and use resources better by combining the roles of some boards, such as continuing
education, registration and licensing and ethics boards.
Some issues have been raised about a lack of coordination with MOH departments in some areas.
The Board for Registration and Licensing considers that it does not get sufficient access to
monitoring reports from various inspectorates including the one covering pharmacies. As noted
earlier, there are several ways to address this including information sharing protocols and job
performance expectations that specifically require cooperative sharing of information in a timely way.
There may be an emerging problem with paying members of these commissions due to a recent
instruction from the PMO not to pay commissions or working groups. If this instruction applies to the
boards listed above, then the MOH will have problems as some of these are performing core
functions.
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