Latest Resources

The roles that women and men play should guide the ways in which clinic staff assess their clients’ needs and provide care. This edition of The Manager shows how awareness of gender issues can improve the design, mangement, and delivery of health services, and takes you step by step through the process of assessing the influence of gender on organizational management. [editor’s description]

During the past several years there has been a global trend in business and industry to move from training to performance improvement. This paper presents a review of selected performance improvement and training literature that has been helpful to JHPIEGO in identifying issues related to this trend and in shaping our performance improvement strategy. [author’s description]

AVSC defines facilitative supervision as an approach to supervision that emphasizes mentoring, joint problem solving, and two-way communication between the supervisor and those being supervised. This definition recognizes that supervisors play an essential role as intermediaries who can facilitate the implementation of institutional goals and who can facilitate local-level problem solving and quality improvement.

There is a serious human resource crisis in the health sector in developing countries, particularly in Africa. One of the challenges is the low motivation of health workers. Experience and the evidence suggest that any comprehensive strategy to maximize health worker motivation in a developing country context has to involve a mix of financial and non-financial incentives. This study assesses the role of non-financial incentives for motivation in two cases, in Benin and Kenya. [abstract]

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…

This presentation was part of the International Conference on Global Health session, “Expanding Emergency Obstetric Care: Overcoming Challenges in Training and Service Delivery.” It discusses the first planned effort by the the largest association of ob/gyns and its academic wing to help build human resource capacity in India to develop EmOC in rural areas. It also presents the specifics of the training EmOC certification course they have developed to address the issue.

This paper represents the second phase of a larger study examining health worker motivation in two hospitals in Tbilisi, Georgia. The overall objective of the 360 degree assessment was to begin to identify the major organizational, situational, and individual factors associated with health worker motivation, and to better understand how major constituencies (i.e., managers, supervisors, workers, and patients) perceive the hospital/work environment. Specific objectives of this study component were to: assess congruence between managers, supervisors and workers on perceptions of hospital goals; compare perceptions of hospital and worker characteristics among types of workers (physician, nurse, other) and levels of respondents (managers, supervisors, workers, patients); and identify possible factors for stimulating good performance and possible interventions for enhancing motivation.

This presentation was part of the International Conference on Global Health session, “Answering the Call: Innovations in Human Resources by African Faith-Based Organizations.” From the perspective of the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau experience, the presentation discusses why the private not-for-profit sector is important in service provision and training; why nurses are in the midst of the human resource crisis; obastacles to increasing the training capacity; and what the PNFP health training institutions are doing to address their weaknesses. [adapted from author]

Poverty and limited health services in rural Africa present barriers to adherence to antiretroviral therapy that necessitate innovative options other than facility-based methods for delivery and monitoring of such therapy. We assessed adherence to antiretroviral therapy in a cohort of HIV-infected people in a home-based AIDS care programme that provides the therapy and other AIDS care, prevention, and support services in rural Uganda. [author’s description]

This study attempted to determine the feasibility of a private sector led long-term intervention to reduce the HIV-infection rate among apparel workers and to provide care and support for those already infected. [author’s description]

This presentation was given at the second annual AAMC Physician Workforce Research Conference, “2020 Vision: Focusing on the Future.” It discusses out migration and brain drain from sub-Saharan Africa and gives an overview of the issues related to this problem, particularly in respect to a project done in Uganda.

Note: This resource is no longer available online

The main objectives of this study in Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau (UCMB) affiliated hospitals were to: assess the
quality of services delivered in accordance to the
available standards; compute staffing requirements for
the hospitals; and set standard workloads for each
type of staff cadre. [from introduction]

Chapter 19 of this report discusses “Palliative Care in Resource-Poor Settings.”

Palliative care is crucial in every care setting, rich or poor, for it is a philosophy of care that centers on improving quality of life for patients and their families. In this chapter, we focus attention on the need to integrate palliative care into national government strategies in order to address the pandemic in resource-poor settings, which includes many developing countries and low-income areas in some industrialized countries. [author’s description]

To identify problems and barriers to [family planning] services specific to each district, to provide data that could assist with project implementation, and to allow determination of benchmarks and targets to measure success, the project started with a baseline assessment of facilities, providers, and community members in the five core districts. The objectives of the assessment were to evaluate factors contributing to the current use of FP services, including: the supply of FP in the public and private sectors: the availability and quality of facilities providing FP services, including the availability of contraceptive methods, IEC materials, and trained providers; and the demand for FP: the population’s knowledge of, attitudes toward, and practice of pregnancy prevention.

In family planning programs, good face-to-face interaction between the client and providers is key to meeting clients’ needs and program goals. Programs can best improve client-provider interaction (CPI) when they move beyond just training providers and strengthen CPI continuously in multiple ways. [summary]

Recent studies have shown evidence of a direct and positive causal link between the number of health workers and health outcomes. Several studies have identified an adequate health workforce as one of the key ingredients to achieving improved health outcomes. This article explores how the Global Fund addresses the challenges of a health workforce bottleneck to the successful implementation of priority disease programmes. [abstract]

In response to increased global public health funding initiatives to HIV/AIDS care in Africa, this study aimed to describe practice models, strategies and challenges to delivering end-of-life care in sub-Saharan Africa. A survey end-of-life care programs was conducted, addressing the domains of service aims and configuration, barriers to pain control, governmental endorsement and strategies, funding, monitoring and evaluation, and research. Both closed and qualitative responses were sought. [author’s description]

Here, we review challenges and approaches to clinical HIV training, and suggest an agenda for implementation research

HIV counselling and testing is a key component of both HIV care and HIV prevention, but uptake is currently low. We investigated the impact of rapid HIV testing at the workplace on uptake of voluntary counselling and testing (VCT). [author’s description]

These guidelines are designed as a practical tool to help businesses implement effective malaria control programmes in order to protect their employees and the surrounding communities. They are also intended to make the case, from social, economic and business perspectives, for businesses to do so. The guidelines provide companies with a framework for choosing suitable malaria control interventions and give detailed information on how employers can initiate and manage these activities. [author’s description]

Many NGOs providing reproductive health (RH) services are facing reductions in donor funding, requiring them to generate more of their own resources. Prosalud, CIES and APSAR, Bolivian NGOs, wanted to build skills in costing and market research to support efforts to improve financial sustainability. Staffs attended a one-week workshop, followed by implementation of three operations research (OR) studies designed to reinforce skills and generate information for decisionmaking. The Prosalud and CIES studies included the calculation of unit cost per service; measurement of client willingness to pay (WTP) higher prices for services, and a market segmentation assessment in selected areas where Prosalud clinics are located.

Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA) Chogoria Hospital is a faith based non-governmental organization providing a wide range of healthcare services. The organization faces a number of challenges related to sustainability: declining donor support (especially for reproductive health services), low cost recovery levels, and increasing poverty levels among its clientele. In response to these concerns, a team from Chogoria Hospital attended a one-week workshop held in Ghana on financial sustainability and developed a small scale operations research project to determine the cost of providing a selected number of reproductive health (RH) services and to evaluate their cost recovery levels.

This paper describes the experiences of three types of programs (government, reproductive health NGO, and women’s health NGO) in Kenya, India, and Guatemala that integrate gender in their work and examines how they integrate gender into programs that improve quality of care and access to care. It should be emphasized that this report does not document whether gender integration results in higher quality and access, but rather documents how gender integration can take place. [author’s description]

Palliative care aims to maximise quality of life and relieve the suffering of patients with life-limiting incurable disease, and to support their families and carers. It is provided through specialist services such as hospices and palliative care teams and in general settings. The HIV/AIDS pandemic and rising cancer rates in Africa have increased the need for well-developed and integrated palliative care services. In sub-Saharan Africa, the concept of palliative care is not well developed and palliative care is largely confined to isolated specialist centres. Services have developed, but in very varied ways. In order to inform future developments, this review aimed to identify and appraise activities, opportunities and evidence of the status of palliative care in Africa.

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]