Advocacy

The purpose of this toolkit is to assist health professionals, health professional associations, and civil society organizations to develop advocacy strategies to address human resource and health financing issues in their countries. [from introduction]

Physicians for Human Rights testimony before the U.S. House International Relations Committee, April 13, 2005 calling for a second Presidential initiative for health in Africa to accelerate the recruitment, retention, training, and rational deployment of skilled health workers while simultaneously continuing to scale up prevention, care, and treatment of HIV/AIDS.

This speech contends that a well performing workforce is the most critical determinant of the performance of services. Well functioning infrastructures and equipment do not serve if the people who deliver the services are not there (be it that there are none available, that they are absent from work, or that they are on strike). Well trained health workers, without the appropriate tools and supplies cannot do much either. And even when all ingredients are there, if workers are not motivated, services underperform. Advocacy to convince policy and decision-makers, as well as international agencies and donors to do something to improve the performance of the health workforce (HW) has been fervent these last 3-4 years, and it has been quite successful.

These training modules and handouts provide the materials to conduct a two day workshop designed to help participants define gender and related concepts; understand the continuum of gender as it relates to integration in projects; understand the six domains of gender and related questions; apply a process for gender analysis to HRH contexts; understand where and how gender can be integrated in HRH country strategies. [adapted from author]

This work intends to review the evidence on how the individual or collective actions of human resources are shaping reforms, by spotlighting the reform process, the workforce reactions and the factors determining successful human resources participation.

This report is designed as a general resource to help family planning program managers strengthen their programs and meet growing family planning needs…It offers a broad overview of key programmatic considerations. Each subsection includes a list of practical specialized resources and hands-on tools that can support program managers desiring to bring about programmatic change… It is hoped that this report will inspire program managers to further investigate ways to strengthen family planning programs so that they may increase contraceptive prevalence and fulfill the reproductive rights of the women and men they serve. [author’s description]