Health Workers

Gender inequalities in admission, retention, and graduation are recognized as significant barriers to achieving preservice education goals. Less attention has been paid to how gender discrimination affects students’ education and career opportunities and faculty professional development, career opportunities, and satisfaction. CapacityPlus compiled and analyzed literature on gender discrimination in higher education, including health worker preservice education. Additional information was gathered by contacting institution staff and reviewing institutional websites. Presented at the 2014 Prince Mahidol Award Conference in Pattaya, Thailand on January 27–31, 2014, this poster summarizes the review, highlights lessons learned by the Kenya Medical Training College, and recommends key actions that stakeholders can take at institutional and governmental levels to counter gender discrimination.

CapacityPlus’s Dykki Settle contributed to this “Perspectives” feature in the special issue of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization published in conjunction with the Third Global Forum on Human Resources for Health. The article emphasizes the potential for leveraging recent investments in information technology infrastructure along with innovations in eHealth, mHealth, and social media in addressing global health workforce challenges. Ten recommendations are offered for training, empowering, and supporting health workers in resource-limited settings through the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). The authors conclude that “the ICT ‘train’ has left the station. It remains to be seen whether the global health workforce will ride along or remain behind.”

In an environment of limited resources, educational institutions must be creative in finding financial resources. This free eLearning course provides an overview of creative financing mechanisms designed to help a health professional education institution reach its funding goals. Participants will learn how to select, prioritize, and implement new financing mechanisms.

CapacityPlus Technical Brief #12 (PDF)

To ensure that medicines and other health commodities reach the people who need them and contribute to improved health, people in the supply chain management (SCM) field must understand and apply effective approaches for developing and managing supply chain workforces. At the same time, those in the human resources for health (HRH) arena must recognize the crucial role of SCM in health service delivery and ensure that HRH policies, strategies, and plans systematically incorporate the supply chain workforce. The objective of this technical brief is to create a bridge between the SCM and HRH communities by describing how the HRH Action Framework can be applied to strengthen the health supply chain workforce, drawing on lessons learned and successes from applications in the health sector.