Monitoring & Evaluation

The aim of this document is to identify and document promising practices to plan, develop and support national human resources in HIV related strategic information/monitoring and evaluation (M&E). This document adds to recent global M&E system strengthening guidance by compiling examples of promising approaches from a wide range of countries, and is intended for use in the creation of country plans to strengthen the workforce to support a fully functional, national M&E system to ensure strategic information for HIV/AIDS programming. [adapted from summary]

This tool is to be used as a starting point for the collation, analysis and synthesis of data and evidence on human resources for health (HRH), as well as for monitoring the strengths and limitations of the underlying information systems. It has been developed as part of a series of efforts to enhance country capacities to generate, analyse and use data to assess health workforce performance and track progress towards their HRH-related goals. [from publisher]

The goal of this tool is to improve the quality of and access to primary health care services, by monitoring and measuring important performance indicators of the health system at district level. It provides an overview of the delivery of primary health care services in the public health sector across the provinces and districts in South Africa by means of an annual publication including data on nurse clinical workload and clinic supervision rate. [adapted from publisher]

This tool is an instrument for healthcare executives to use in assessing their expertise in critical areas of healthcare management. [adapted from author]

This toolkit has been developed to facilitate the development of a public health workforce competent to meet its assigned mission. One part of that process is the use of competency-based curricula in public health training or education and how to determine the right activities for moving from a competency set to developing a curriculum. [adapted from author]

The core competencies are a set of skills desirable for the broad practice of public health. They reflect the characteristics that staff of public health organizations may want to possess as they work to protect and promote health in the community. The competencies are designed to serve as a starting point for academic and practice organizations to understand, assess, and meet education, training and workforce needs. [adapted from introduction]

Each country profile presents the most recent available information on selected demographic measures of maternal, newborn and child survival and nutritional status, coverage rates for priority interventions, and selected indicators of equity, policy support, human resources and financial flows. [from publisher]

Health care educators need valid and reliable tools to assess evidence based practice (EBP) knowledge and skills. The purpose of this study was to develop and validate a modified Fresno Test to assess EBP knowledge and skills relevant to physical therapist practice. [adapted from abstract]

World Health Statistics 2010 contains WHO’s annual compilation of data from its 193 Member States, and includes a summary of progress towards the health-related Millennium Development Goals and targets. [from publisher]

This handbook offers health managers, researchers and policy makers a comprehensive, standardized and user-friendly reference for monitoring and evaluating human resources for health. It brings together an analytical framework with strategy options for improving the health workforce information and evidence base, as well as country experiences to highlight approaches that have worked. [from preface]

Evidence Based Practice (EBP) involves making clinical decisions informed by the most relevant and valid evidence available. Adopting an evidence-based approach to practice requires differing competencies across various domains including literature searching, critical appraisal and communication. This paper examines the current tools available to assess EBP competence and compares their applicability to existing assessment techniques used in medicine, nursing and health sciences. [from abstract]

This paper aims to describe the design, methods and approaches used to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the skilled care initiative in reducing pregnancy-related and perinatal mortality in Ouargaye district, Burkina Faso. [from summary]

This article offers guidance regarding the benchmarking of health workforce sufficiency as a critical component of monitoring and strengthening the performance of national health systems. [adapted from introduction]

This presentation outlines a methodology to improve quality and accessibility of health care with greater involvement of the community in defining, implementing and monitoring the quality improvement process.

This presentation discusses the QIQ method of evaluating the quality of service delivery and provider performance.

While evaluation is, in theory, a component of training programmes in health planning, training needs in this area remain significant. Improving health systems necessarily calls for having more professionals who are skilled in evaluation. This article describes a four-week course taken by two cohorts of health professionals from 11 francophone African countries. We discuss how the course came to be, its content, its teaching processes and the master’s programme results for students. [from abstract]

This chapter is an excerpt from “Community-Based Health Care: Lessons from Bangladesh to Boston.” Using tools of statistical quality control, simple field epidemiology can both motivate and lead community health efforts to achieve higher coverage of essential services. Even basic health workers can measure their accomplishments, which motivates all involved to strive toward agreed-upon goals. The importance of repeated measurement at the local level is well illustrated in this chapter. [adapted from author]

Several high-profile meetings have focused global attention on critical human resources for health (HRH) issues, providing much needed high-level support and calls for action to address the HRH crisis. The Capacity Project’s HRH Action Workshop series was intended to extend this work by focusing on specific HRH actions and experiences, what is being done in countries, what is working and what is not.

The community score card process is a community-based monitoring tool that is a hybrid of the techniques of social audits and citizen report cards.The CSC is an instrument to exact social and public accountability and responsiveness from service providers. By linking service providers to the community, citizens are empowered to provide immediate feedback to service providers. [from author]

Drawing upon a combination of complementary data sources, both new and existing, can result in useful and rich information for measuring and monitoring health workforce stock and flows, and the impact on health and health systems. [from author]

Measuring and monitoring the whole education and training pipeline is essential to the planning, management and quality control of the health workforce in a country. This requires timely and reliable data on each of its phases. [from author]

This easy-to-use web-based tool compiles and analyzes country data from multiple sources, provides charting options, and generates automated country fact sheets, helping users to assess the performance of the country’s health systems.

Improving service delivery for the poor is an important way to help the poor lift themselves out of poverty. This resource presents and evaluates tools and techniques to measure service delivery and increase quality in health and education.

This brief provides a list of facility-based data collection tools that have been developed by the World Health Organization and other partners. The resources can be used to meet a wide range of specific information needs on human resources in health systems. [adapted from summary]

Nurses provide the bulk of primary care services in South Africa. Post-apartheid health legislation envisions the provision of comprehensive primary services at all public clinics, which implies the need for a cadre of primary care nurses able to render such services. The objective of this study was to identify core competencies of clinic nurses and develop an evaluation tool for primary care nursing in South Africa. [from abstract]

Family Medicine training and assessment is becoming more formalized and developed in South Africa. Assessment of competency in relation to clinical skills can involve observation in the clinical setting, but is more usually assessed in an examination. Summative assessment of family physician’s clinical skills now usually includes an Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE). Standardisation of the OSCE is required to define the pass mark above which a candidate performs at the level expected of a family physician. [from abstract]

The aims of these guidelines are to provide information about the concepts and processes essential for quality assurance of basic nursing and midwifery education in the African Region; propose a process and content for evaluating existing basic nursing and midwifery education programs; stimulate ideas for establishing a quality assurance system for basic nursing and midwifery education; guide allocation of human and financial resources in current and future programmes and services; provide well-defined international and regional standards of education. [from introduction]

Uganda has been successful in implementing the national “Health Management Information System” (HMIS). Disease surveillance reports and monitoring of key output indicators within the health sector seem to be the areas with the most remarkable advance. But little mention has been made on the importance of the use of information for monitoring performance indicators and for management/decision making purposes. The existing HMIS makes this possible. In this paper, the authors present the contribution of the PNFP health sector to the operationalization of the HMIS and of its use as a tool geared towards performance assessment and informed management decision-making. [from abstract]

To evaluate the quality of maternal clinical care, Immpact, a global research initiative, developed an innovative method, called TRACE, to trace adverse and favourable events in pregnancy care. It is based on the confidential enquiry technique, whereby expert panels of health care professionals assess the quality of health care provided to clients in an
adverse event, such as a maternal death. [author’s description]

This article assesses interventions aimed at improving family planning mechanisms and reviewing the problem-solving processes to build an effective monitoring system of the interventions at the local level of the overall system of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of Bangladesh. [adapted from author]