The Knowledge library

Knowledge Library

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.

Scaling Up Health Workforce Education and Training: Guide for Applying the Bottlenecks and Best Buys Approach

Bottlenecks and Best BuysCapacityPlus’s Bottlenecks and Best Buys Approach is designed to help educational institutions identify obstacles to increasing the production of competent and qualified health workers that can be overcome through limited yet strategic investments. This guide identifies the stakeholders who should be involved, the steps in conducting a bottlenecks assessment, and a method for using the results to identify and build consensus on the most effective and affordable actions (best buys) for overcoming bottlenecks. It also provides tools and examples for strategic steps in the approach, such as engaging stakeholders, conducting a situation analysis, defining the school’s scale-up goal, leading group interviews, analyzing the results, and presenting the final bottlenecks and best buys report to external stakeholders and potential investors. Access the guide and annexes, along with related resources.

Building the “Educational Home”: Staying Connected to Alumni with MEPI Graduate Tracking in Tanzania

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.

Developing a Human Resources for Health (HRH) Effort Index to Measure Country-Level Status in HRH

Human resources for health (HRH) are an essential component of health systems and crucial to increased accessibility and quality of services. However, there is a scarcity of HRH indicators and the few that exist are often unreliable, inconsistently related to outcomes, or do not inform on the multidimensional nature of the area. Based on HRH and performance-based frameworks, CapacityPlus and a technical advisory group developed the HRH Effort Index to measure inputs and outputs in HRH. Presented at the Prince Mahidol Award Conference in Bangkok (January 26–31, 2015), this poster highlights preliminary results from testing the HRH Effort Index in Kenya and Nigeria.

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.

HRH Global Resource Center

HRH Global Resource CenterThe HRH Global Resource Center is CapacityPlus’s digital library of human resources for health (HRH) information. The world‘s largest online digital library dedicated to HRH issues in developing countries, it contains approximately 5,000 resources and offers free librarian support. Users can browse by subject, resource type, and geographic area as well as access HRH overviews and special collections. The HRH Global Resource Center’s eLearning platform offers free courses in English, French, and Spanish with certificates of completion.

MEPI Connect—An Open Source Graduate Tracking Software System: Resource Requirements to Customize and Implement the System

MEPI Connect is a software system that supports medical schools to track and engage with their graduates. The system allows users to view and analyze graduates’ demographic and professional information. The information is obtained initially from the school registrar’s office, then from the graduates themselves, and, when possible, from human resources information systems at ministries of health and/or professional councils. The software was developed by the PEPFAR-funded Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Physician Tracking Technical Working Group in collaboration with CapacityPlus and the MEPI Coordinating Center. This document describes resource requirements to customize and implement the system.

Estimating the Cost of Educating and Training Nurses and Midwives: Balancing Quantity and Quality

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.