A first-of-its-kind public health leadership programme for the Gulf Cooperation Council region

The State of Kuwait reaffirmed its endorsement to the mandates and longstanding partnership with WHO during the inauguration of the WHO Country Office in Kuwait in June 2021. Guided by the strategic direction outlined in the National Development Plan, WHO’s on-the-ground presence enables direct and scaled up support to national authorities on public health matters. Partners from the government, intergovernmental and non-State actors welcomed the Country Office’s presence with a series of high-level meetings culminating in a Country Support Plan for the 2022-2023 Biennium .

Building on the momentum four months into its opening, the Country Office coordinated a high-level public health programme targeting senior officials within ministries of health in Kuwait and neighboring countries. The programme, Public Health Leadership for Positive Change, was guided by the Ministry of Health and engaged collaborating partners from academia, including the Kuwait Institute for Medical Specializations and Kuwait University. With the commitment of the Gulf Health Council, senior officials from the ministries of health in Bahrain and Oman were active participants in the first cohort of programme participants. The curriculum, which aims to build a critical mass of health leaders in the region with strong public health competencies, interpersonal qualities and attributes, was developed and delivered in collaboration with faculty from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the United Nations System Staff College and the three levels of WHO—headquarters, regional and country level.

Throughout the four day, in-person component of the programme, over 20 middle to senior level public health officials participated in lectures, interactive exercises and dialogue around priority subjects within public health leadership, including diplomacy, effective communication, collaboration, and systems-thinking in the context of sustained improvements in human and planetary health. Participant evaluation of the programme revealed unanimous enthusiasm of its content and method of delivery. Participants highly recommended the programme to superiors and colleagues at the Ministry. The first-of-its-kind in the region, the programme marks a critical steppingstone towards strengthening Kuwait’s national health workforce to respond to the burgeoning burden of noncommunicable diseases, to prepare for future pandemics, and to meet WHO’s triple billion targets.

How did Kuwait do it, and how did WHO support Kuwait?

Identifying the need for training – Kuwait’s Ministry of Health led a well-coordinated, multisectoral response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It strengthened national capacity across sectors at all levels of government, reviving a sense of urgency for impactful, strategically-led public health programming. In order to sustain these gains beyond the pandemic, high-level public health leadership programming must be embedded in higher education curricula and within institutional memory. Leadership competencies are not often part of public health training programmes nor are they included in other specialized health curricula, highlighting a need for opportunities to fill this gap. Leadership competencies, such as communication, collective learning, and collaboration, are required to respond to adaptive challenges in situations of emergency and beyond. The same leadership competencies are required to decisively address the increasing crisis in noncommunicable diseases, which accounts for over 1.7 million deaths annually in WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean Region alone, and costs billions to economies.

Multistakeholder collaboration to develop a training programme – WHO, as coordinating authority on public health matters, and its three-level operating model uniquely poised the Organization to coordinate multistakeholder collaboration to develop the public health leadership programme. To design a high-quality, immersive programme that addresses implementation gaps relevant to public health leadership practice, the WHO Country Office partnered with global health education experts at Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health and the United Nations System Staff College. Designed to be executive and flexible in nature, the programme uniquely combined four-day, in-person training at the headquarters of the Kuwait Institute for Medical Specializations with two weeks of online modules hosted by the United Nations System Staff College platform. Health professionals were immersed in domains crucial for effective, collaborative leadership, including systems-thinking, essential public health functions, and health diplomacy. Interactive sessions were delivered over a broad range of issues of public health priority. Participants learned through keynote lectures and through navigating their own experiences and sentiments with their peers.

“I consider this course among one of the best conferences or trainings I have ever attended globally.”

Programme participant

Medical doctor working in Kuwait’s Ministry of Health

• Implementation and scaling the programme – The WHO Country Office in Kuwait partnered with the Ministry of Health to implement the programme, rolling it out with national and regional partners. Disruptions related to COVID-19 restricted in-person presence of some speakers but the disruption was overcome through video conferencing. The programme succeeded in communicating the urgency of strengthening leadership in public health to national counterparts and provided a model to deliver the programme in a sustainable format to future cohorts of middle to senior level participants from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries.

WHO works to support Kuwait through building capacity to exercise effective health systems governance. As the WHO County Office in Kuwait celebrates its first birthday, the importance of such programmes gains momentum, highlighting the impact of the country presence of WHO with larger scope for public health cooperation and enlarging the contribution from the country future leaders to global health audience. The future continuity plan for the public health leadership training programme foresees engagement of multiple stakeholders in the health community. These include representatives from the ministries of health, academic medical institutions, hospitals, medical associations and members of medical societies, allowing the programme to fulfil its goal in establishing a framework to sustain competencies and attributes in health leadership that are contextualized specifically for the Gulf Cooperation Council region. The next session of the programme, which will engage a cohort of 35 participants, is planned for 2022.

Photo Credit: © WHO Country Office in Kuwait

Photo Caption: Cohort of faculty and participants attending the 2021 Health Leadership for Positive Change programme.