Action for Health and Equity, Addressing medical Deserts (AHEAD)

The Project AHEAD (Action for Health and Equity, Addressing medical Deserts) aims to support policy makers in their health workforce reforms targeting medical deserts: ‘the end point of a complex ‘medical desertification’ process, that implies continuous and increasing inability of a given population to access health services in a timely and contextually relevant manner’. The AHEAD project is carried out in Italy, Moldova, the Netherlands, Romania and Serbia, highlighting different manifestations of medical deserts. AHEAD features two unique selling points: a medical deserts diagnostic tool (MDDT) and a consensus building methodology. 1. The MDDT intends to support policy makers in identifying and monitoring medical deserts (and areas at risk), by visualising health worker and health services densities, at disaggregated level, on interactive maps. Evaluation findings indicate great interest for this tool among policy makers, as well as challenges in data availability. 2. The Consensus Building (CB) Methodology brings together a broad group of stakeholders playing a role in, or affected by, medical desertification. During a series of interactive workshops, they jointly explore causes and effects of medical desertification, exchange experiences, and develop feasible and context-specific policy solutions. These policy solutions are subsequently discussed during national policy dialogues, where commitments are made by the various actors and duty bearers to implement them. Evaluation findings acknowledge the added value of this participatory, multi-stakeholder approach. Because the policy options are context-specific, policy dialogues yielded a wide variety of policy solutions. However, several common themes emerged relating to the variety of actors needed at the tables, the importance of their different and complementary mandates, and the need to address related power dynamics.