Productivity

This paper reviews the situation and trend in human resources for health and its priority problems in Thailand. It also highlights the issue of the inequitable distribution of doctors. Through several brainstorming sessions among stakeholders, it summarizes a package of recommendations for the future continuous and sustainable knowledge-based human resources for health development. [from abstract]

This presentation was part of the 2006 Global Health Mini-University. A key approach to address the global shortage of healthcare providers is to improve the productivity of existing workers, thereby improving the quality and coverage of services. Improving the work environment and task shifting of health functions to different cadres of providers are two promising interventions that are being used for this purpose. This session will describe and discuss these and some of the other innovative solutions to enhance the capacity and productivity of the current workforce and to build coherence into the management of human resources for stronger health systems. [publisher's description]

Australia is experiencing workforce shortages across a number of health professions despite a significant and growing reliance on overseas trained health workers. The shortages are even more acute in rural and remote areas. It is critical to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the available health workforce, and to improve its distribution. This report describes the Australian government's objectives of developing a more sustainable and responsive health workforce while maintaining a commitment to high quality and safe health outcomes. A set of national workforce objectives are also proposed.

This report discusses the impacts of malaria on business. It reviews the academic literature on the impacts of malaria on economies and businesses, presents data from survey on the business impacts of malaria, discusses the actions the private sector can take to combat malaria, and reviews examples of business malaria programs. The final section makes some recommendations for businesses considering engagement in malaria control. [adapted from author]

The Population Council and The Pubcomm Group, Inc. have developed simple, inexpensive, user-friendly computerized job aids to assist supervisors in improving the quality of family planning, maternity care, and postabortion care services. The software is free to download. [publisher's description]

Health care organizations often do not know what their costs are and have no simple way of assessing costs on a regular basis... This cost analysis tool involves site administrators and service providers themselves in measuring recurrent direct costs of providing services. [author's description]

This presentation was part of the ECSA Workforce Observatory Meeting in Arusha. It discusses health labor force dynamics including how traditional workforce planning does not consider key issues, incentive issues and mapping workfoce productivity in Ghana.
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Policy makers and hospital administrators are seeking evidence to support nursing staffing decisions that includes both the volume and mix of nurses required to provide efficient and effective care. The principal objective of this study was to examine the interrelationships between variables thought to influence patient, nurse, and system outcomes. The results provide quality, evidence-based standards for adjusted ranges of nursing productivity/utilization and for staffing levels for patients receiving cardiac and cardiovascular nursing care. [from executive summary]

By looking at the many projects completed and under way, we can speculate about what lies ahead for HPT (called simply performance improvement in our community) in the places we work. [The author] make some predictions for the future of performance improvement in developing country public health. [He] thinks performance improvement use will become ubiquitous, more flexible, more inclusive of other approaches, and more comprehensive in looking at performer support systems. [adapted from author]

This rapid-assessment guide is designed to help users arrive at a global overview of a country's HRH situation. The guide is designed to help users assess current HRH constraints and challenges to "scaling up" health interventions. HRH main issues include: Policy, regulation and planning; Management and performance improvement; Labour market; Education, training and research; HRH and priority health programmes; and Monitoring and evaluation. [author's description]

This document reports on the findings of three projects in Canada that link population health needs to health human resource planning, to illustrate the value and challenges in using health human resource data to inform policy decisions on nursing productivity and to generate evidence based retention policies to guide nursing workforce sustainability. [adapted from summary]

In low and middle income countries, health workers are essential for the delivery of health interventions. However, inadequate health-worker performance is a very widespread problem. We present an overview of issues and evidence about the determinants of performance and strategies for improving it. [authors' description]

This report was commissioned to describe experiences and to provide lessons learnt with respect to interventions to retain staff and improve their productivity, competence and responsiveness. [from summary]

The purpose of this publication is to describe some of the practical issues and options involved in introducing these types of improvement initiatives. It is aimed at both policy makers and those responsible for the actual implementation of hospital management reforms. It presents some draft agreements and policies developed in particular countries which may be adapted to local conditions elsewhere or which may prompt ideas in the development of new ones. [author's description]

A foundation of collaborative partnership, strong technical staff and field presence, and practical monitoring and evaluation anchored the PRIME II Project’s successful efforts to improve the performance of primary providers of family planning and reproductive health (FP/RH) services. PRIME II’s global achievements and lessons learned are summarized in the first section; an overview of project results in each technical leadership and focus area is presented in Chapter 2. [author's description]

Nurses, as the largest human resource element of health care systems, have a major role in providing ongoing, high-quality care to patients. Productivity is a significant indicator of professional development within any professional group, including nurses. The human resource element has been identified as the most important factor affecting productivity. This research aimed to explore nurses' perceptions and experiences of productivity and human resource factors improving or impeding it. [from abstract]

This study focused on the positive traits and strategies exhibited by high-performing facilities to determine how to improve performance at average and low-performing sites. [from author]

Concern about increasing demand for reproductive health services has led program managers to examine the productivity and costs of existing programs. While all programs can advocate for additional funds from their governments and establish or increase prices for services to clients, often they can also use their existing resources more efficiently. Evidence from reproductive health programs across developing countries suggests that service providers are often underutilized. [author's description]

This report describes a pilot program aimed at transplanting a pioneering workforce change process developed in the United Kingdom to the United States to address the growing health care workforce shortage. The program includes numerous techniques that have helped hundreds of English hospital teams learn a structured process for generating new ways of working. The program ensures that good human resource processes and change management techniques are incorporated in a series of activities that help clinicians and their support staff plan and implement improvements to services. [adapted from au

Occupational stress and burnout merit concern in South Africa as the severity and intensity of the HIV epidemic is often perceived as overwhelming, leaving many caregivers with intense feelings of hopelessness and despair. This study explores and describes the experiences, feelings and perceptions of South African caregivers working in various capacities (healthcare, counselling and teaching) in the HIV/AIDS field. [from abstract]

Family planning and other health care organizations in developing countries increasingly must do more with the same resources, and sometimes with fewer. Reorganizing work processes offers one common-sense way to help staff members at all levels cope with growing demands. [author's description]

The Ministry of Public Health has implemented increasingly complex payment schemes to cope with the internal brain drain situation among certain categories of health personnel. Non-private-practice allowances have been given to medical doctors, dentists and pharmacists since 1993 and a fee-for-service scheme for extra office hour practices started since 1994. This research is to evaluate the impact of the fee-for-service payment on productivity and quality of care and to consider any resultant moral hazards amongs health providers. [from abstract]

This study is concerned with the productivity of nurses working within the Primary Health Care System, under the control of the Ministry of Local Government in Botswana. The study establishes the nature, strength and direction of associations between productivity and background variables, work context variables, resources variables, recognition and support variables. [Description from authors]

In countries where available human resources for health (HRH) are insufficient to meet the needs, it is increasingly vital that health workers are supported to do their jobs effectively and efficiently. Health care worker productivity is a key ingredient of quality health services. The benefits of addressing productivity include greater efficiency, reduced workload intensity, increased worker satisfaction and a higher quality of care. [author's description]

This review paper...looks at strategies that have been undertaken to increase the productivity of health workers. It examines the evidence to support or reject the hypothesis that short term training, incentives, better equipment, supplies and conditions and other things can be employed that improve outputs and health outcomes without increasing the numbers of health workers. The review provides an overview of key aspects and options for improving productivity, with country illustrative examples. [author's description]

This report presents a review of issues in the regional policy context that are of relevance to the retention of human resources for the health sector (HRH) within the region, based on a rapid appraisal in selected countries and at regional level. This work specifically focussed on the actions needed to stem the flow of international migration by encouraging the retention of health staff within countries. A particular concern raised across countries is staff retention in the public and rural services that preferentially serve the poorest populations. Importantly, policy documents and national

The Report on Efficiency of Public Hospitals in Namibia is produced to provide information on the status quo in efficiency of district hospitals. The report provides information on the state of the technical efficiency of district hospitals in Namibia using ratio and frontier techniques, namely data envelopment analysis. It indicates the efficiency savings that are expected from all the district hospitals and the required input use if each of the inefficient hospitals function as efficiently as their peers on the frontier. Furthermore, the basic concepts and methods of hospital efficiency measurement are discussed, thus, greatly contributing to the much needed capacity in the area of efficiency assessment in health care.

This article describes a survey of health workers and traditional birth attendants (TBAs) which was carried out in 2005 in two regions of Ghana. The objective of the survey was to ascertain the impact of the introduction of a delivery fee exemption scheme on both health workers and those providers who were excluded from the scheme (TBAs).

This report summarizes the findings and conclusions of [a baseline study and a three-day stakeholder workshop on productivity]. Specifically, we present the baseline study findings, identify areas where current productivity falls short of desired levels, consider the root causes of identified productivity gaps and offer practical recommendations for feasible management interventions to improve productivity. We conclude with a short-term action plan for moving forward with implementation activities. [from introduction]