Education and Training

Education and Training

The preservice education and training of health workers play an essential role in developing a competent and qualified workforce. It is widely recognized that a comprehensive, systems-based approach is needed to increase the quantity and quality of graduates, who are capable of working where needed at all levels of health services, and with a particular focus on rural, remote, and underserved populations.

CapacityPlus’s work to expand high-quality preservice education involved partnering with local stakeholders and institutions to adapt and apply innovative approaches for building the capacity to produce more health workers with the critical competencies needed to increase access to high-quality family planning/reproductive health and HIV/AIDS services. These approaches focus on reviewing a school’s production capacity and identifying the bottlenecks that impede the institution from successfully scaling up the quality and quantity of graduates, and defining priority actions, or best buys, that have the largest potential for overcoming constraints with the least amount of additional investments.

In addition to identifying areas for targeted investments, the approaches focus on improving the use of scarce resources (human, financial, material, and intellectual) for scaling up the production of graduates through the self-study of a school’s management practices, and the introduction of more efficient and effective school management practices. They draw upon a set of tools to: 1) identify schools that are most likely to scale up successfully; 2) perform systematic assessments to identify capacity and management bottlenecks; 3) identify and prioritize key actions or interventions needed to overcome bottlenecks and strengthen school management; 4) estimate the costs or investments needed for expansion and reform; and 5) provide targeted technical support for the implementation of priority interventions.

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