The Knowledge library

Workforce Effectiveness

Supporting Country-Led Efforts to Recruit and Retain Health Workers and Improve Productivity

CapacityPlus built the capacity of national human resources for health (HRH) leaders and managers in Uganda, Laos, and Malawi to use the project’s retention and productivity tools to generate evidence and inform decisions to influence policy-making and improve the availability of services through increased staffing and distribution.

Promoting Gender Equality in the Health Workforce: An Advocacy Tool

Health workforce leaders may not be aware of the ways in which gender discrimination impedes efforts to develop, efficiently deploy, and fairly compensate their workforce. This can result in maldistribution, absenteeism, and a limited pool of motivated health workers, which can negatively impact the provision of health care. This advocacy tool helps users to understand how common forms of gender inequalities and discrimination can negatively affect the health workforce; assess whether health workers may be experiencing one or more forms of discrimination; and successfully advocate and take action through policy-making and improved management to reduce gender discrimination and build a more motivated and effective workforce to serve the population’s family planning, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and other primary health care needs.

Health Workforce Productivity Analysis and Improvement Toolkit

Health Workforce Productivity Analysis and Improvement ToolkitThe health workforce is critical for ensuring access to high-quality family planning/reproductive health, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, and other services in order to improve health outcomes. While increasing the number of health workers where there are shortages is essential, it is equally important to improve the productivity of the existing workforce and make service delivery more efficient. The Health Workforce Productivity Analysis and Improvement Toolkit describes a step-wise process to measure the productivity of facility-based health workers, understand the underlying causes of productivity problems, and identify potential interventions to address them. Users can enter and save facility-level data on service delivery outputs and human resources costs in order to calculate total health workforce productivity and compare these rates across facilities. This process differentiates higher-productivity facilities from lower-productivity ones, which through a qualitative assessment can help managers and supervisors to consider which factors are affecting health workforce productivity in the facilities.

Optimizing Performance and Quality: Stages, Steps, and Tools

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.

Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit: Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Health Workers

Rapid Retention Survey ToolkitThe Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit is designed to help countries determine what would motivate health workers to accept and remain in rural posts. It builds on the World Health Organization global policy recommendations for rural retention and is based on the discrete choice experiment (DCE), a powerful research method that identifies the trade-offs professionals are willing to make between specific job characteristics and determines their preferences for various incentive packages, including the probability of accepting a post in a rural facility. Employing a simplified version of the DCE methodology, the toolkit guides HR managers through the survey process to quickly assess health students’ and health workers’ motivational preferences to accept a position and continue working in underserved facilities. The results can be used to create evidence-based incentive packages that are appropriate within a country’s health labor market. Read more »

Study of Attrition, Availability, and Retention of Midwife Service Scheme Officers in Nigeria

The Midwives Service Scheme, established in 2009 to reduce Nigeria’s high maternal mortality rate, supplies midwives to rural and remote areas where they are most needed. CapacityPlus collaborated with the National Primary Health Care Development Agency to study factors underpinning attrition, availability, and retention of personnel and propose measures for motivating and retaining rural-based midwives. Presented at the Third Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Cape Town, South Africa, on October 1, 2014, this poster presents findings from the study.

Health Workforce Productivity: An Approach for Measurement, Analysis, and Improvement

Increasing health workers’ productivity will make service delivery more efficient and ensure that high-quality family planning, reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, maternal and child health and other key services are accessible to the population. This free course on the Global Health eLearning Center, by CapacityPlus’s Rachel Deussom and Wanda Jaskiewicz of IntraHealth International, explores some basic concepts of health workforce productivity. It provides useful descriptions of a quantitative, formulaic approach for measuring productivity at the facility level; possible underlying causes of low productivity and methods to measure them; and potential interventions to improve productivity and strengthen health services. It takes approximately two hours to complete the course, after which each learner will receive a certificate.

Using Evidence for Human Resources for Health Decision-Making: An Example from Uganda on Health Workforce Recruitment and Retention

A strong and well-distributed health workforce is necessary for providing access to high-quality health care and achieving national and global health goals. Developing and implementing policies to effectively address health workforce challenges demands relevant data for evidence-based decision-making. This technical brief offers six recommendations to help national stakeholders transform evidence into policy decisions and subsequent action. Using an example from Uganda, the authors illustrate how the development and sharing of evidence can support decision-making for change in health workforce recruitment and retention policies, toward the aim of improving access to high-quality health care for the population.