At the session held on 10 February 2022 the Government of the Republika Srpska has been acquainted and adopted the information on the development of nursing workforce information system. Having previously obtained the acceptance of relevant governmental departments, the information was presented by the RS Ministry of Health and Social Welfare (RS MoH). The preparation of the information was preceded by a number of documents needed to implement this project task, developed within the Strengthening Nursing in BIH (ProSes) project.

Nursing workforce constitutes the largest part of health workforces in most of the countries in the world. Adequately distributed, in sufficient numbers and with needed competencies, they can significantly contribute to the health services availability and better population health outcomes. According to the RS Public Health Institute data, there were 6’701 health workers with secondary or two-year post-secondary education working in RS public health sector in 2019. Among them, nurses are the most numerous. However, neither this nor other existing data bases of health system institutions contain information on the number of nurses that are unemployed, work in the private sector or in non-nursing professions.     

The mentioned information system will be linked with the other data bases existing in the RS health system in order to enable access to and merging with other relevant data. This unique data base will serve to:
i)    monitor professional qualification of nurses in order to determine the areas that need broadening of competences via
      professional training
ii)   support the process of health workers licensing
iii)  monitor nursing workforce movement within the health sector to be able to quickly determine where to find nurses with
      needed qualifications – something that has proved to be particularly important during a crisis such as the current
      pandemics   
iv)  continuously analyse the structure of supply and demand in terms of the health workers number and competences, and plan
      nursing workforce in light of changing needs of the health system, population structure and requirement of the
      health services beneficiaries.

During the same sessions, the Government has charged the RS MoH with coordinating the development and the RS Agency for Certification, Accreditation and Health Care Improvement with running the information system.

The aforementioned project achievement is the results of a long-term efforts and close collaboration and coordination of ProSes, RS MoH and other key stakeholders in the health sector to find a system solution to develop an integrated data base of nurse workforce. In the coming months ProSes will support software development, hardware purchase and interfacing with the source registries, thus making the information system entirely functional.