Knowledge Library

CapacityPlus Technical Brief #16 (PDF)

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) make immense contributions to the health sector in many parts of the world. Yet they are often not integrated into planning and resource allocations for national health systems, leading to service and system redundancies and gaps. FBOs also face numerous human resources for health (HRH) challenges, similar to other public- and private-sector institutions providing health services. The Africa Christian Health Associations Platform (ACHAP) has strengthened its members’ capacities to address HRH challenges with support from CapacityPlus. This technical brief presents examples from ACHAP members’ efforts to strengthen HRH and integrate FBOs into national health systems and the HRH community. The brief highlights achievements in selected areas, provides lessons learned, and offers seven key recommendations for furthering FBOs’ efforts.

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.

In the transition to the post-Millennium Development Goals era, many low and middle-income countries will be making significant shifts in their national health policies. The leadership that is drawn upon to make policy changes tends to be in ministries of health, flagship hospitals, physicians and nurses associations, and social protection entities. Health professional schools are an additional and valuable—yet often overlooked—source of leadership in health reform and health policy-making. This technical brief highlights some examples of how the education and research leadership of health professional schools has engaged, influenced, or obtained resources from national policy-makers and others with significant influence on the health sector. The brief also reviews instances in which different health educational institutions and professional associations have worked to shape national responses to health system needs.