The Knowledge library

Education and Training

Innovative Financing Options for the Preservice Education of Health Professionals

Many developing countries are making significant investments to increase the number of health workers available to provide care to growing populations. However, the available funding is far short of what is required. For these countries to train and produce a health workforce sufficient to meet the populations’ needs, new sources of funding for health worker education need to be found. To address this problem, CapacityPlus partnered with the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank, and the Global Health Workforce Alliance in an exploration of innovative financing of health worker education. This technical brief presents a summary of the forms of financing proposed or documented through this process.

Spaced Education: An Innovative Learning Methodology to Support Health Workforces

An overview of CapacityPlus's collaboration with QStream.com on eLearning courses that educate health workers on topics that are contextually significant.

Scaling Up Health Worker Production: The Bottlenecks and Best Buys Approach

Countries need to rapidly scale up the production of health workers in order to ensure universal access to health care and address the global shortage of over four million doctors, nurses, midwives, and support workers. In many cases, small but targeted investments in the preservice education of health workers can lead to measurable increases in the production of qualified and competent graduates. This technical brief presents an overview of an approach to help identify critical bottlenecks to providing quality preservice education and prioritize affordable actions for increasing the quantity of graduates while maintaining or improving the quality of education.

iHRIS Administrador: Nivel 1

Este curso producido por el HRH Global Resource Center (el Centro Mundial de Recursos sobre los recursos humanos para la salud) ofrece instrucciones sobre el conjunto de habilidades básicas y necesarias para administrar y personalizar el software del CapacityPlus de sistemas de información de recursos humanos, iHRIS Manage e iHRIS Qualify.

Strengthening the Health Worker Pipeline through Gender-Transformative Strategies

CapacityPlus conducted a systematic review of 300 articles, reports, program documents, and websites on gender discrimination in higher education, including health worker preservice education. A panel of experts in gender and in human resources for health then reviewed summaries of 51 interventions identified from the literature search, according to selected characteristics of gender-transformative interventions. This technical brief provides an overview of how gender discrimination affects health professional students and faculty as well as intervention options that the expert panel identified as having potential to counter gender discrimination. In addition, it offers recommendations for preservice education institutions and other stakeholders to address these challenges. Also see the related report.

Transforming the Health Worker Pipeline: Interventions to Eliminate Gender Discrimination in Preservice Education

Governments and preservice education institutions must take action against gender barriers if they are to produce robust workforces able to respond to the health needs of the populations they serve. This report describes the results of a systematic and expert review undertaken to identify practices that have the potential to counter forms of gender discrimination against students and faculty in preservice education institutions. Also see the related technical brief.

A Mixed Method Approach to Identifying Bottlenecks in the Production of Health Workers

Provision of quality health services starts with health workers and the training they receive. Given resource limitations, it is essential to ensure that investments in preservice education are the most efficient and effective in producing quality health workers. Presented at the Second Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Beijing on November 2, 2012, this poster describes results from a needs assessment at six institutions in Mali using a mixed method approach to identify the key bottlenecks to providing quality preservice education in family planning and reproductive health for nurses and midwives.

Keeping Up to Date: Continuing Professional Development for Health Workers in Developing Countries

In order for health workers to provide quality care and meet their communities’ changing health care needs, they must become lifelong learners dedicated to updating their professional knowledge, skills, values, and practice. This technical brief summarizes the literature concerning current best practices and innovative ideas in continuing professional development (CPD). It is targeted toward people who run or advise CPD programs.

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