Tools for Strengthening the Health Workforce

CapacityPlus has created simple, two-page overviews of selected tools related to the project’s technical expertise in health workforce global leadership, policy and planning, education and training, workforce effectiveness, and evaluation and knowledge-sharing. For more information, please contact us.

• Guidelines for forming and sustaining stakeholder leadership groups: Overview of practical actions that countries can take to successfully launch and sustain stakeholder leadership groups

• HRH Action Framework: A comprehensive approach for addressing health workforce issues: Assists governments and health managers to develop and implement strategies to achieve an effective and sustainable health workforce

• Human resources management rapid assessment tool: Assists policy-makers, managers, and practitioners to understand, assess, and respond to underlying HR management issues and challenges facing the health system

• iHRIS Manage: A tool for managing the health workforce: Allows decision-makers at the Ministry of Health, a district health office, or a health care facility to collect, manage, and analyze detailed information about employed health workers and applicants

• iHRIS Qualify: A tool for tracking health professionals and their qualifications: The health professional training, licensing, and certification component of the iHRIS Suite

• iHRIS Retain: A tool to cost retention strategies: User-friendly tool to cost retention strategies to be implemented at the district, regional, or national level

• Professionalization of under-recognized health worker cadres: Overview of the Life Cycle Approach, which systematically addresses all the crucial steps in the professionalization of under-recognized cadres

• Bridges to health worker employment: Ten suggestions that health professional schools, ministries of health, employer councils, and others can implement to shorten the time between graduation and employment

• Spaced education: An innovative learning methodology to support health workforces: eLearning courses that educate health workers on topics that are contextually significant

• Learning for Performance: Toolkit for health worker education and training: Targeted to fix a performance problem or gap when health workers lack the essential skills and knowledge for a specific job responsibility, competency, or task

• Innovative financing for preservice education: Some innovative forms of financing for health professional schools to consider

• Strengthening preservice education institutions: Strategies for scaling up health worker production: Innovative strategies to increase the production of health professionals

• Retaining health workers: A rapid methodology to develop evidence-based incentive packages: Overview of the rapid discrete choice experiment (DCE) tool, intended to allow HR managers to determine health workers’ motivational preferences

• HRH Global Resource Center: A tool for research and information: Digital library dedicated to health workforce issues in developing countries

Photos by Trevor Snapp. (Health worker in Guatemala; health worker in Panama)