Ministry of Health Launches Five-Year Plan to Transform Healthcare Workforce

The Ministry of Health and Wellness has unveiled two landmark documents aimed at transforming Belize’s healthcare workforce over the next five years. Today, the ministry officially launched the Belize Human Resources for Health Policy and the Belize Human Resources for Health Strategic Plan 2026–2030, providing a roadmap to strengthen recruitment, training, deployment, and retention of healthcare professionals while addressing a critical shortage of health workers nationwide.  The new policy is built around four priority areas: strengthening governance and regulatory frameworks, expanding the education and training of health professionals, ensuring strategic and equitable recruitment and deployment, and improving the attraction, motivation, and retention of healthcare workers. According to Director of Health Policy, Research and Planning, Dr. Andrei Chell, the accompanying five-year strategic plan transforms those priorities into practical actions that will be implemented across Belize’s health system.

Dr. Andrei Chell, Director, Health Policy, Research and Planning, MOHW: “So today we’re launching two documents, the Belize Human Resources for Health Policy and Strategic Plan 2026-2030. The policy is guided by four policy priority actions. The first focuses on threatening HRH governance and regulatory frameworks. We’re also talking about enhancing strengthening education the production of HRH. We’re also talking about the strategic and fair recruitment and deployment of our health professionals and then of course we’re talking also about the attraction, the motivation and the retention of our health care workers right. So now these four policy actions are translated now into strategic objectives and outputs in the five-year strategic plan now. So the strategic plan now sets the actual activities that we now need to carry over in the next five years to strengthen our health workforce.”

The launch also comes as Belize continues to operate below the World Health Organization’s recommended threshold for healthcare workers needed to achieve universal health coverage. Current figures show the country has 38.2 physicians, nurses, and midwives per 10,000 people, falling short of the WHO benchmark of 44.5 health workers per 10,000 population.  Dr. Chell says the newly launched strategic plan is specifically designed to close that gap, with a major emphasis on strengthening health workforce data collection. He explained that having accurate, district-level information will allow the ministry to better identify shortages, allocate resources, and make evidence-based decisions on where healthcare workers are needed most.

Dr. Andrei Chell, Director, Health Policy, Research and Planning, MOHW:  “So currently, Belize has 38.2 physicians, nurses and midwives per 10,000 population. The recommended threshold by the World Health Organization is 44.5 physicians, nurses and midwives per 10,000. That is to meet universal health, to move towards universal health coverage. We know that we have shortage of healthcare workers and so these two documents try to address those challenges. However, when it comes to the distribution, a more in-depth situation analysis can be found in both documents and what we are trying to strengthen in both documents is actually health workforce data. We need data. We need to know precisely what you’re seeing, right? How much physicians are in the different districts in the rural areas, nurses for example, right? So we do want to be guided by evidence. We do want to be guided by the data and that is why we are strengthening our health workforce information system to guide our health workforce planning in the years to come.” 

Ministry officials say today’s launch marks the beginning of implementation, stressing that the focus now shifts from policy development to coordinated action. Over the next five years, the government intends to expand Belize’s health workforce while ensuring future planning is guided by reliable data, ultimately improving access to quality healthcare services across the country.