IMPROVEMENT OF QUALITY STANDARDS IN HOSPITAL CARE IN GEORGIA. PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTIVES

Health systems provide health actions-activities to improve or maintain health. These actions take place in the context of and are influenced by political, cultural, social, and institutional factors. Demographic and socioeconomic makeup, including genetics and personal resources, affect the health status of individuals seeking care. Access to the health care system is required to obtain the care that maintains or improves health, but simple access is not enough; the system's capacities must be applied skillfully. Thus, quality means optimizing material inputs and practitioner skills to produce health. As the Institute of Medicine defines it, quality is "the degree to which health services for individuals and populations increase the likelihood of desired health outcomes and are consistent with current professional knowledge." Globally, there is an acute shortage of human resources for health (HRH), and low-income countries bear the highest burden. This shortage has not only considerably constrained the achievement of health-related development goals but also impeded accelerated progress towards universal health coverage (UHC). Like any other low-income country, Georgia is experiencing a health workforce shortage, particularly in specialized healthcare workers to cater to the rapidly growing need for specialized health care (MOH Training Needs Assessment report (2015). The efficient use of the existing health workforce, including task shifting, is under consideration as a short-term stopgap measure. At the same time, deliberate efforts are being put on retention policies and increased production of HRH. The results of the analysis confirmed the essential leadership and managerial competencies for public hospital managers in Georgia. These competencies include Policy development and implementation, strategy development and orientation; plan-making; human resource management; financial management; equipment and infrastructure management, information management, risk and disaster management, self-management; quality management; investigation, supervision, monitoring and evaluation, ethics and knowledge. There are necessary competencies. Managers have to fulfill their tasks effectively and use them as a basis to develop competency-based training for the current management taskforce and preparing future hospital managers. This kind of study was limited before starting short and long term (including Master program Health Management and Administration) educational programs in different regions of Georgia. Thus, it should be further studied to gain an overall and clear picture of leadership and managerial competencies for hospital public managers. Taking into account the labor market flows in Georgia, to train and inspire a new generation of Health Administration professionals in global network atmosphere, provide broad knowledge, skills and expertise that is needed to undertake leadership roles in addressing critical issues of Health Administration at the national and global level is an urgent need. For this purpose, the elaboration and implementation of student-centered and competence-oriented Georgian-USA Collaborative Master Program in Health Administration with our future activities will be a relevant approach.