Success Story: Building a Health Professional
Licensure System for Uganda

In Uganda, the Ministry of Health and four health professional licensing organizations—including the Uganda Nurses and Midwives Council—needed to know which health professionals were licensed to work in the country, what training they had received, if they were leaving the health workforce, and if so, why. Although a complex system of paper forms was in place, there was no way to aggregate or analyze the information, and indeed, it was very difficult just to track down one nurse's current name, address or licensing information.

Working closely with the Stakeholder Leadership Group, which includes representatives from several departments in the Ministry of Health, the four professional licensing associations, training institutions and nongovernmental organizations, we developed iHRIS Qualify, a registration and licensing system that would track all health professionals such as nurses from the time they entered pre-service training until they left the health workforce. We demonstrated the system at the World Health Day conference in Uganda in April 2006. Using a snapshot of four years of pre-service training data, we were able to show that one-third of nursing students entering training did not go on to take the final exam to attain registration, and that half of those who took the exam did not pass it. The data even demonstrated that the most populous urban districts had the highest failure rates. This was the first time the Ministry of Health had actual data of this kind, and it immediately impacted their policy decision making.

iHRIS Qualify has been installed in all four professional health councils and data entry on all licensed health workers has been completed. We have trained local staff on how to produce reports and maintain and customize the software. We are now in the process of installing iHRIS Manage at the Ministry of Health. Once this is complete, Uganda health policy makers will be able to use the entire iHRIS suite to quickly access comprehensive and up-to-date data on the country's health workforce.

Learn More
Building HR Information Systems: Leading the way Together in Uganda (Voices from the Capacity Project Series - PDF)