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Update on the MDGs: Where Are the Health Workers?

August 2011 by Sarah Dwyer and Sara Pacqué-Margolis
TAGS: Advocacy, Health Systems Strengthening, Health Workforce, Millennium Development Goals

Sarah DwyerThe UN’s Millennium Development Goals Report 2011 provides a fascinating snapshot of how far we’ve come in improving health outcomes—and how much further we need to go. Unfortunately, the report ignores the health workforce crisis in many of the countries struggling to meet their 2015 health goals. The MDGs cannot be achieved when large numbers of people lack access to a health worker, yet the persistent, severe shortage of health workers is paid scant attention in the recently released UN report.

A fundamental barrier to improving health is the health worker crisis. The report’s section on Goal 5 (Improve Maternal Health), for example, points out that far too many women are without access to a skilled birth attendant during delivery. While many regions have made progress, “coverage remains low in sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asia, where the majority of maternal deaths occur.” Read more »

Building the Workforce to Help Orphans and Vulnerable Children

August 2011 by Maurice I. Middleberg
TAGS: Haiti, Kenya, Nigeria, OVC, Social Welfare Workforce, Zimbabwe

Maurice Middleberg“She’s 14 years old and HIV-positive. She has been taking ARVs her whole life but no one told her why she was taking medications. She finally confronted the doctors and asked for an explanation as to why she was taking the pills. The doctors answered her questions. She then had something of a crisis and became quite depressed. We have been working with her and we’re very happy because she seems to have recovered. You can see she is back playing with the other children and smiling again.”

This story was told to me during a recent visit to Haiti by a staff member at an NGO working with orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). It is a poignant reminder of the terrible costs of the HIV pandemic, which has created a large number of children who have lost a parent or live in a household with a seriously ill adult. In Haiti there are more than a million such children. This problem was exacerbated by the January 2010 earthquake, which resulted in an additional 150,000 orphans.

The needs of OVC extend beyond health services to include mental health care, schooling, food and nutrition, shelter, and protection from abuse and exploitation. The clinician or community health worker is usually ill-prepared to arrange and integrate the array of services needed by OVC. These are the skills of the social worker. Read more »

iHRIS: A Year of Development

August 2011 by Carol Bales and the iHRIS Team
TAGS: HR Information Systems, ICT, Open Source

Carol BalesWe know that most “year in review” articles are published in January, coinciding with the new calendar year, but the year that’s been consuming our thoughts just ended. CapacityPlus’s second fiscal year wrapped up in June and, since we’ve been concentrating on iHRIS development over the last year for our year-end reporting, we thought we’d post a summary of our accomplishments.

Following the “release early, release often” philosophy that encourages user feedback, we published 11 new releases of our iHRIS Qualify and iHRIS Manage software. We added new capabilities focused on improving the usability of the software, expanding translation support, enhancing our reporting module for data analysis and use, and, of course, fixing bugs. Read more »

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