Health Workforce

Christian Health Association of Malawi: General Report of the Health Workforce Productivity Assessment and Early Progress on Implementation of Improvement Interventions

Health workforce productivity measures the number of health services produced by health workers in a given period of time. Assessing health workforce productivity at the health facility level is a key step for developing and implementing effective improvement strategies. The Christian Health Association of Malawi, in collaboration with CapacityPlus, conducted a productivity assessment through a field test of CapacityPlus's Health Workforce Productivity Analysis and Improvement Toolkit. This report presents findings from the assessment as well as early progress from implementation of the improvement interventions through June 2015.

Strengthening the Supply Chain Management Workforce in Namibia: Applying the WISN Method to Estimate Staffing Needs

People that Deliver is a global initiative that aims to address human resources inefficiencies in the public health supply chain. With the challenges faced in Namibia, the Ministry of Health and Social Services requested that People that Deliver pilot, with support from CapacityPlus, an integrated set of interventions to strengthen the supply chain management workforce. One of these interventions was to estimate the types and numbers of supply chain workers needed at central and regional medical stores based on the estimated workload. The World Health Organization’s Workload Indicators of Staffing Needs (WISN) tool was used to estimate the required number of pharmacists, pharmacist assistants, and clerks required at the national and regional levels of the supply chain. The findings, which indicated shortages in all three cadres of supply chain personnel, are presented in this report.

Compendium of Approaches and Tools for Expanding High-Quality Health Workforce Education and Training

This compendium categorizes and describes approaches and tools that national stakeholders can use to address common challenges in expanding high-quality education and training. It lists sources of globally-recognized, evidence-based guidelines and recommendations for scaling up and transforming health professional education. It then suggests resources to support the implementation of those recommendations, categorized in relation to the health workforce production pipeline framework.

The Dean’s Dashboard

Health workforce educational institutions are struggling to meet the increasing demand for health workers capable of providing quality health services to expanding populations. More effective and efficient management of education and training institutions can play a major role in a country’s ability to scale up its production of competent and qualified health workers. Presented at the GETHealth Summit in Dublin, Ireland (November 13–14, 2014), this poster describes findings from a pilot of the Dean’s Dashboard at three schools in Africa. When aligned with a school’s strategic planning efforts, the Dean’s Dashboard offers the potential for regular reports on progress toward strategic goals as well as management information in a form that is easily accessible to institutional leaders. As an open source application, it is an affordable tool for information management and presentation.