Sub-Saharan Africa

This 7 minute video presents the issues of HRH in Mali and a program to train community health workers to provide life-saving services in the hardest-to-reach places in Mali. [adapted from publisher]

This 4.5 minute video talks about the HRH issues and the importance of strengthening HRH for health services in Cote d’Ivoire and a Health Systems 20/20 project that worked with in-country partners to improve production of health workers, create incentives to motivate health workers to move to the underserved north, and build health management capacity. [adapted from publisher]

This brief describes the process and outcomes of a project in Nigeria that developed a standard, integrated tuberculosis (TB) supervision checklist to assess and monitor diagnostic laboratories and TB services at the facility-level in the public and private sectors, which was deployed using smartphones. [adapted from author]

This artical reports the clinical and programatic outcomes at 24 months for a cohort of patients enrolled in a community-based anti-retroviral treatment (ART) program in southeastern Rwanda which provided additional measures of support at the community level, including community-based psychosocial support and directly observed ART delivered by community health workers. [adapted from author]

This presentation from the Irish Forum for Global Health 2012 outlines research that explored the perceptions of district health management teams in Tanzania and Malawi on their role as supervisors and the challenges to effective supervision at the district level. [adapted from author]

This paper provides cost guidance for one adaptable configuration of a community health worker subsystem: a provider system housed within a larger primary-health-care system that includes clinics and referral hospitals. Costing is done by function and by local epidemiologic characteristics so that components and assumptions can be easily modified. [adapted from introduction]

This edition of Hotline, an HRH newletter focused on the needs of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in Africa, highlights resources, trainings and workshops, articles of interest and other information for FBO HRH pracitioners.

This edition of Hotline, an HRH newletter focused on the needs of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in Africa, highlights resources, trainings and workshops, articles of interest and other information for FBO HRH pracitioners.

This edition of Hotline, an HRH newletter focused on the needs of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in Africa, highlights resources, trainings and workshops, articles of interest and other information for FBO HRH pracitioners.

This edition of Hotline, an HRH newletter focused on the needs of faith-based organizations (FBOs) in Africa, highlights resources, trainings and workshops, articles of interest and other information for FBO HRH pracitioners.

This article describes an assessment of the effects of community mobilisation through women’s groups, and health education through female volunteer peer counsellors on rates of infant care, feeding, morbidity, and mortality. [adapted from author]

This article explored the how and why of care decision making by frontline providers of maternal and newborn services in the Greater Accra region of Ghana and determine appropriate interventions needed to support its quality and related maternal and neonatal outcomes. [from abstract]

This study was undertaken to determine providers’ adherence with evidence based TB standards and guidelines in Zambia at national, provincial/district and facility-based levels. [adapted from summary]

This study looked at previous literature and conducted a program review to identify approaches that address human resource constraints that would enable scale up of voluntary medical male circumcision for reduction of female-to-male HIV transmission for public health impact. [adapted from abstract]

This report presents the results of an assessment of the use of distance learning to alleviate the shortage of health care workers in Tanzania. Its objectives include: determine the feasibility of and demand for distance learning in Tanzania to meet the current need for skilled and qualified health care workers; create a detailed inventory of distance learning programs; describe the training that distance learning could provide, and identify the potential cadres that could benefit from new or expanded distance learning programs. [adapted from author]

The intent of this study is to inform stakeholders about the opportunities for and constraints on building the social work workforce within the child welfare sector in Africa through an analysis of Africa-specific program descriptions and evaluations; government policies, laws, and strategic plans; and statistical data on the child welfare and social welfare workforce. [from summary]

This paper describes a text message-based solution that harnesses the prevalence of mobile phones coupled with several open source tools to empower para-social workers who carry the primary responsibility in providing essential services to the growing population of orphans and vulnerable children in Tanzania. [adapted from abstract]

This study aims to make the labour market visible for histopathologists and identify the reasons for sector switching of clinical doctors. [adpated from abstract]

This situational analysis of a twinning center’s para-social worker training program in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Nigeria provides a descriptive snapshot of the evolution and current status of the programs, and identifies lessons learned and promising practices across all three programs, especially those that might guide possible program scale-up or replication. [adapted from summary]

This article examined the association between a mobile phone intervention and skilled delivery attendance in a resource-limited setting. [from author]

There is a growing consensus that user fees undermine equitable access to essential health care in many low and middle income countries. Changes to fees have major implications for human resources for health (HRH), though the linkages are rarely explicitly examined. This study aimed to examine the inter-linkages in Zimbabwe in order to generate lessons for HRH and fee policies, with particular respect to reproductive, maternal and newborn health. [from abstract]

This study sought to further the evidence on how socio-demographic factors influence community health worker effectiveness in conducting home visits in order to ensure the adoption of evidence based maternal, newborn, child health and nutrition best practices and to increase demand for facility based services, including skilled birth attendance. [adapted from author]

This analysis paper highlights the process of standard defining for Medical Education in a typically low resourced sub Saharan medial school environment. [from abstract]

HIV/AIDS infection of workers in health care facilities has become a major health problem. The aim of the study was to assess knowledge, attitude and practice of health care workers towards post exposure prophylaxis for HIV. [adapted from abstract]

The aim of this study was to formatively evaluate a 12-week, completely online module from a South African university for medical specialists in their first year of training; assessing both the mode of delivery as well as the perceived effectiveness and usefulness. [adapted from abstract]

This article examines three South African community health worker programs, a small local non-governmental organisation, a local satellite of a national NGO, and a government-initiated service, that provide a range of services from home-based care, childcare, and health promotion to assist clients in overcoming poverty-related barriers to health care to identify factors that constrain and enable outreach services to improve access to care. [from abstract]

Using a rapid assessment, this study examines the outcomes of a pilot community health worker program to improve the management of hypertension and diabetes in Gauteng province, South Africa. [from abstract]

The article draws on a policy implementation framework to analyse the implementation of occupation-specific dispensation (OSD), a financial incentive strategy to attract, motivate, and retain health professionals in the public health sector, and seeks to determine whether the manner in which OSD was implemented caused unintended negative consequences. [from author]

The objective of this study was to compare the job satisfaction and intention to leave of different categories of health workers in Tanzania, Malawi, and South Africa. The results caution against generalising about the effectiveness of interventions in different contexts and highlight the need for less standardised and more targeted HRH strategies than has been practised to date. [from abstract]

The following case study describes and reflects on a partnership between a southern university, the University of the Witwatersrand, and Soul City Institute to establish an academic, competency-based social and behaviour change program serving Southern Africa. [from author]