Education and Training

This manual was developed to assist district health management teams in countries where malaria is endemic to improve the quality of malaria treatment given by private clinics, pharmacies, shops and kiosks. It gives step-by-step instructions for how to implement a public health activity that will involve wholesalers in communicating malaria guidelines to retailers and private clinics. [author’s description]

The Quality Assurance Project investigated how job aids could increase compliance with guidelines for the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) in cooperation with the Zambia Central Board of Health beginning in 1999. One of the first countries to introduce IMCI, Zambia had a large number of IMCI-trained providers, and several IMCI job aids were already in use: a chartbook, recording form, poster, and mother card.

The involvement of district-level workers in local-level practical approaches to mainstreaming gender is central to facilitating change and informing health strategies. There are very few practical examples of mainstreaming gender in health, especially at the lower levels of the health sector. One approach is to build the capacity of staff to conduct and respond to gender analysis. [author’s description]

Training and innovative tools were key to the success of the Tanzania Essential Health Interventions Project, along with small funding increases. The tools and strategies allowed the districts of Rufiji and Morogoro to target their new resources on the largest contributors to the burden of disease and on health care delivery. The most dramatic result, among many, has been an average decline in child mortality of more than 40%. [from author]

This checklist is designed to be completed by clinical trainers preparing for clinical training courses. It covers the areas of Participant Selection and Management, Classroom Logistics, Clinic Logistics, and Classroom Preparation/ Management.

This newsletter concentrates on planning, preparing, delivering and reviewing training sessions designed for employees like health workers.

The maintenance of competence by rural district hospital medical practitioners is a challenge faced by all countries and, most acutely, by resource-poor nations. It is a vital element in addressing the disparity between rural and urban health care in South Africa. The aim of this study was to define expert consensus on the content and methods most suitable for the maintenance of competence by rural district hospital practitioners in the Western Cape province of South Africa. [author’s description]

A successful leprosy care and control program within the general healthcare services at the PHC level is highly dependent upon the HWs having adequate knowledge of, and practical training on, leprosy. This study describes PHC workers’ knowledge of leprosy, and their practical involvement in leprosy care and control activities at PHC clinics in the Eerstehoek area of Gert Sibande district in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, where leprosy still occurs. [author’s description]

A comparison showed that two models for teaching maternal care skills to providers resulted in similarly modest improvements in knowledge and performance. However, maternal care skills remained weak overall. Training should incorporate the best elements of the two approaches while seeking improvements in basic knowledge of maternal care. [author’s description]

Past attempts to estimate the cost of migration were limited to education costs only and did not include the lost returns from investment. The objectives of this study were: (i) to estimate the financial cost of emigration of Kenyan doctors to the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States of America (USA); (ii) to estimate the financial cost of emigration of nurses to seven OECD countries (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, UK, USA); and (iii) to describe other losses from brain drain. [author’s description]

JHPIEGO has been working since 1991 to support the development of a national integrated clinical training system used for both family planning/reproductive health (FP/RH) preservice education and inservice training in Turkey.

From 1987 to 1998, JHPIEGO, through its Training in Reproductive Health (TRH) Project, collaborated with the Association of Deans of Philippine Colleges of Nursing (ADPCN) and the Association of Philippine Schools of Midwifery (APSOM) to strengthen preservice nursing and midwifery education in the Philippines. Between 1987 and 1994, JHPIEGO initiated activities to strengthen family planning/reproductive health (FP/RH) and enhance trainer/faculty development in five nursing schools and five midwifery schools.

Beginning in 1992, JHPIEGO worked in close collaboration with the Bolivia Ministry of Health (MOH) to develop an integrated family planning/reproductive health (FP/RH) training network throughout the country. The focus of the assistance was the establishment of nine national training centers (NTCs) for inservice training conducted by physician-nurse teams and located at departmental maternity hospitals in departmental capitals. By 2000, the government of Bolivia and other stakeholders had shifted the training emphasis to preservice education efforts.

JHPIEGO and the United States Agency for International Development/Ghana, has now focused on strengthening preservice education for nurses and midwives who provide FP/reproductive health (RH) and safe motherhood services. The phased strategy will ultimately strengthen preservice classroom and clinical training components in all ten midwifery training schools (MTS) in Ghana. To clarify the needs of the training institutions and guide program planning, two needs assessments were conducted at the MTS in Kumasi and Koforidua.

JHPIEGO’s strategies for strengthening Ghanaian preservice education in family planning/reproductive health and essential maternal and neonatal care have included: developing and implementing a standardized, competency-based curriculum; improving knowledge and skills of tutors and clinical trainers/preceptors; reinforcing service delivery sites used for clinical practice; and providing schools and clinical training sites with anatomic models and supporting training materials. [adapted from author]

The goal of this paper is to describe the establishment of a self-sustaining Student Learning Center (SLC) employing humanistic anatomical models to aid in the teaching of family planning and reproductive health clinical skills to nursing students in Nepal.

WHO, World Bank, and other human resources for health experts globally have recognized the dearth of human resource data for the health sector in many developing countries. In the present assessment, JHPIEGO reviewed the availability of staff deployment and training data from routine information systems in Malawi to inform the Ministry of Health and Population (MOHP) of deficiencies that would need to be addressed in order to better inform the development and ongoing monitoring of deployment and training policies and plans.
[publisher’s description]

This publication is for training managers, trainers of health providers, decision-makers, and those who fund and support training actvities. It examines distance learning as an effective training approach for reproductive health providers in developing countries. In addition to describing the components of distance learning, this publication will provide illustrative examples for training health workers, outline steps for starting a distance learning program and suggest additional resources. It will help readers plan and implement effective distance learning. [author’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]

Using the training needs projection methods in the Spectrum Policy Modeling System software module ProTrain, this report estimates the numbers of family planning/reproductive health service providers needed to reach total fertility rate and contraceptive prevalence goals for Malawi from 2001-2007. [adapted from publisher]

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]

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]

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

Using all of the tools in the document will provide a comprehensive assessment of skills and service delivery. Each tool, however, may be used separately or combined with others to create a document appropriate for the content of a specific maternal and newborn health training course. [author’s description]

This paper examines various aspects of the nursing and midwifery workforce in Africa, looking at education and supply systems; recruitment, retention and motivation and career systems. It further investigates attrition from migration and HIV/AIDS, as well as other factors and makes some recommendations on how to move forward using examples of experiences from countries. These experiences, albeit on a small scale, show promise of good results after being scaled up. [author’s description]

Human resources become increasingly relevant in this context. Health human resource (HHR) is currently experiencing a three-fold problem, which encompasses old issues, together with the effects of reform, and the consequences of globalisation. This includes the workforce crisis in nursing which, facing all kinds of difficulties, requires complex in-depth analysis, synergies and alliances in order to ensure quality nursing services.

This literature review provides a short summary on some specified features of the training systems which are in place in developing countries (mainly low income Africa and Asia) which supply key workers into the health and education sectors. [author’s description]

The long-term objective of this paper is to galvanize action to ensure that all current and future health managers are well prepared to lead and manage to achieve results. With good preparation, they will be able to develop and manage the kind of health services that achieve health goals, reduce illness, and save lives. [author’s description]

This paper aims to provide an overview of the current evidence and opinion of the workforce implications of regulation, competency development and role definition. These three elements are inextricably linked to each other and are fundamental to the practice of nursing in today’s environment. [from introduction]

Tools to assist primary providers and their managers in assessing, monitoring and improving the gender sensitivity of family planning and reproductive health services on an ongoing basis. [publisher’s description]