Health Workers

This case study is part of the interactive ePlatform for the World Health Organization’s guidelines on transforming and scaling up health professionals’ education and training. Knowledge about the cost of educating and training health workers is needed to support education program planning and management and to inform advocacy for increased investment. Ethiopia’s federal ministries of health and education collaborated with CapacityPlus and the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative to conduct a cost analysis of the nursing and midwifery programs at two colleges. The objectives were to estimate the cost of producing a graduate; identify fixed-asset constraints to scaling up the quantity and/or improving quality of graduates; and simulate the new cost per graduate for interventions to increase the quality of graduates.

This case study is part of the interactive ePlatform for the World Health Organization’s guidelines on transforming and scaling up health professionals’ education and training. CapacityPlus is collaborating with the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Coordinating Center, MEPI Physician Tracking Technical Working Group, and MEPI-supported medical schools in 11 African countries to develop resources and good practices for graduate tracking and to foster exchange through a regional graduate tracking network. The MEPI Connect graduate tracking software is helping African medical schools to remain connected with their graduates. Tracking allows institutions to assess the effectiveness of strategies to retain graduates at posts in underserved areas.

Optimizing Performance and Quality (OPQ) is a stakeholder-driven, cyclical process for analyzing human and organizational performance and setting up interventions to improve performance and quality or build on strengths and successes. It has been used by country leaders in over 15 countries to strengthen health-sector governance through greater accountability and transparency, broadened partnerships, and measurable results in improved service quality. The OPQ process builds capacity within an organization to recognize and address problems or performance gaps on an ongoing basis. Each of the seven stages provides evidence-based guidance and steps to follow, with a suite of tools to help users through the process.

Report of Training Needs Assessment for Community Health Workers

One of the recommendations from a 2013 CapacityPlus assessment of PEPFAR-funded in-service training in Nigeria was to ensure broader access to new developments in knowledge and technology, as well as sustainability of training, by integrating the in-service training contents into preservice education curricula and continuing professional development programs. This assessment explored community health extension worker and community health officer perceptions of globally-accepted competency domains for public health practitioners across the areas of importance, and confidence in their ability to demonstrate those competencies. To corroborate findings at the domain level, the assessment also assessed these health workers at the individual skill/ability levels, which are mapped to the competency domain areas. Need scores were calculated for each competency domain and individual skill/ability levels. A need score ranking placed the need for computer and information technology access and skills as the top priority among health workers who participated in the study. Financial planning and management and public health science skills ranked a close second and third. Read more »