Commentary

Annual meeting consensus statements lead to TUFH strategy update

William Burdick MD MSEd ¹, Lionel Green-Thompson MBBCh PhD ²

¹Secretary-General, The Network: Towards Unity for Health

²Vice Secretary-General, The Network: Towards Unity for Health

The annual gathering of TUFH gives members a voice in the direction of the organization. Annual meetings in Thunder Bay, Fortaleza, Tunis, Darwin, Mexico City, Yogyakarta, Vancouver, and most recently Sharjah produced visionary documents to guide TUFH strategy. The Sharjah Consensus 2023, led by participants using an appreciative inquiry model, was built on four themes articulated at the Vancouver Annual meeting in 2022: (1) community-driven health and wellness; (2) in-community education and training; (3) socially accountable health workforce; and (4) systems thinking in health and wellness. A vision with associated actions and performance indicators was developed for each theme. The TUFH 2024–2027 strategy document, summarized here, is the direct result of their work. Click on these links for the full Sharjah Consensus and TUFH 2024–2027 Strategic Plan.

The goals of the TUFH 2024–2027 Strategy are:

1. Social accountability. By 2027, 30% of recognized accreditation agencies will include social accountability in their standards. Additionally, 15% of health professional education institutions in targeted regions will have completed an institutional assessment and verification process.
   Strategies include:
   • disseminate tools for institutions to measure the societal impact of their actions.
   • recognize institutions that complete the Institutional Social Accountability Assessment (ISAT) and accreditation entities that adopt social accountability standards.
   • publish research on accreditation that includes impact on wellness in our journal, Education for Health.
   • Amplify the impact of community voices through explicit engagement in conference planning and delivery.
2. Interprofessional education and collaborative care. By 2027, 25% of faculties of medicine, dentistry, and nursing schools will require an interprofessional collaboration course or practicum as part of their curriculum. Additionally, 15% of medicine, dentistry, and nursing schools will have measured how their health system’s policies, practices, and performance impact society.
   Strategies include:
   • convene institutions to define roles, education, and certification of health workers beyond traditional health professionals.
   • develop policies to include social scientists and social workers in the health team.
   • call for submissions to Education for Health on curriculum innovations in interprofessional education and care.
   • encourage TUFH Academies´ participants to develop projects focused on health worker teams.
3. Health workforce education. By 2027, 50% of institutional faculty and students of medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, and physiotherapy will have completed at least one TUFH Academies course on health workforce education.
   Strategies center around our role as a non-state actor in official relations with the World Health Organization:
   • TUFH will align with and support WHO policies such as WHO Global Strategy on HRH 2030, “Working for Health”, National Health Workforce Accounts, WHO Global Competency and Outcomes Framework for UHC, and Rural Recruitment and Retention Guidelines.

The visions articulated in the Sharjah Consensus are bracing: transform TUFH strategy from community engagement to community-driven, build a community of institutions moving toward greater social accountability, expand the social accountability concept to a wider and greater number of schools, and build centers of excellence that will provide an additional layer of recognition for achievement in domains such as social accountability—beyond what accreditation bodies are currently addressing.

The strategies to accomplish this vision are just as daunting, but with the collective effort of our members, education through our TUFH Academies, and dissemination of knowledge through our journal, our 2024–2027 strategy can be achieved.

© Education for Health.

Education for Health | Volume 37, No. 1, January-March 2024

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