Latest Resources

Given that IT projects may take a long time to be fully institutionalized, sufficient resources are required to build the local capacity to support and sustain the project after the withdrawal of donors. Inadequate donor support often contributes to weakening rather than strengthening human resource capacity and effective system design, since it emphasizes the technology itself at the expense of the needs of the users. These factors contribute to the design and implemntation of unsustainable health information systems in developing countries. [from abstract]

District health systems in Africa depend largely on public funding. In many countries, not only are these funds insufficient, but they are also released in an untimely fashion, thereby creating serious cash flow problems for district health managers. This paper examines how the untimely release of public sector health funds in Ghana affects district health activities and the way district managers cope with the situation. [from abstract]

This paper synthesises some of the published and grey literature on the process of scaling up the health workforce - also known as human resources for health (HRH) - with a particular focus on increasing the number of trained providers of health services. It concentrates on low- and middle-income countries, although some literature on richer countries is included. [from summary]

A number of low- and middle-income countries have a severe shortage of health workers. This paper studies how health workers’ choices of labour supply and work effort impact on the quality of health services when health workers are in short supply. [from abstract]

This video, produced by the Center for Global Development, outlines the case for a new metthod of disbursing donor contributions for global health called Performance-Based Incentives (PBI). PBI aims to boost global health by basing donor contributions on performance and permitting developing countries health systems to determine how to disburse these incentives. [from publisher]

Rwanda is one of the pioneers of performance-based financing. Building on lessons from three donor-financed pilots, the government has assumed leadership for this approach and is scaling up a standardized model nationwide. [from author]

Taking advantage of societal trends involving the “third sector”, a social model of philanthropy and the open-source software and educational resource movements, provides the opportunity for online education for capacity building at low cost. The Peoples Open Access Education Initiative, Peoples-uni, aims to help build public health capacity in this way, and this paper describes its evolution. [from abstract]

The purpose of this research was to assist public health policy makers and managers to develop programs and policies to enhance the effectiveness of Public Health Nurse (PHN) services. The research question was, “What organizational attributes support PHNs to practice their full scope of competencies?” [adapted from author]

This tool is a hands-on guide that can be used to teach nurses coaching principles and skills in order to develop individual professional competencies and to improve nurse staffing retention. [from author]

The purpose of this toolkit, consisting of 7 booklets, is to provide nurses and midwives with tools to effectively participate in and influence health care planning and policy-making. This tool-kit has been designed for use by any nurse or midwife who has an interest in advocating for change in their work environment. [from publisher]

The regional guidelines for implementing the SDNM in the African Region are to accelerate action at country level. The guidelines also provide both a framework for WHO action to support countries in improving the quality of nursing and midwifery services, and a guide for action at national and local levels. Possible priority actions have been proposed to countries to facilitate strengthening of nursing and midwifery services at national and local levels. [from foreword]

With some of the worst health indicators and the least adequate health services in the world, providing health services and rebuilding health systems in fragile states is a complex undertaking. This health and fragile states dossier highlights the challenges and approaches to delivering health services in fragile states. [from publisher]

This paper aims to discuss the challenges influencing the state of caregiving in the Kanye community home-based care programme in Botswana. [from abstract]

Because of their knowledge of medicines and clinical therapeutics, pharmacists are suitably placed for task shifting in health care and could be further trained to undertake functions such as clinical management and laboratory diagnostics. Indeed, pharmacists have been shown to be willing, competent, and cost-effective providers of what the professional literature calls pharmaceutical care interventions; however, internationally, there is an underuse of pharmacists for patient care and public health efforts. [from abstract]

The Zambia Prevention, Care and Treatment Partnership began training and placing community volunteers as lay counsellors in order to complement the efforts of the health care workers in providing HIV counselling and testing services. These volunteers are trained using the standard national counselling and testing curriculum. This study was conducted to review the effectiveness of lay counsellors in addressing staff shortages and the provision of HIV counselling and testing services. [from abstract]

The potential for traditional birth attendants (TBAs) to improve neonatal health outcomes has largely been overlooked during the current debate regarding the role of TBAs in improving maternal health. Randomly selected TBAs were interviewed to gain a more thorough understanding of their knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding maternal and newborn care. [from abstract]

The objective was to provide a systematic review of the effectiveness of community-level interventions to reduce maternal mortality. Selection criteria were maternity or childbearing age women, comparative study designs with concurrent controls, community-level interventions and maternal death as an outcome. [from abstract]

This study examined the attitude of health care workers to nurses, doctors and patients infected with HIV. [from abstract]

Recent years have seen growing awareness of the importance of human resources for health in health systems and with it an intensifying of the international and national policies in place to steer a response. This paper looks at how governments and donors in five countries: Cameroon, Indonesia, Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania, have translated such policies into action. [from abstract]

Prevention of mother-to-child transmission has been considered as not a simple intervention but a comprehensive set of interventions requiring capable health workers. Viet Nam’s extensive health care system reaches the village level, but still HIV-infected mothers and children have received inadequate health care services for prevention of mother-to-child transmission. We report here the health workers’ perceptions on factors that lead to their failure to give good quality prevention of mother-to-child transmission services. [from abstract]

The purpose of this paper is to present a complex yet transparent, computable model to simulate the regulation of the flow of personnel through a multiple-exit eye care training scheme linked to the health workforce. The proposed training system is based on the notion that all practitioners within eye care be trained with a selection of topics from a common set of competences. In theory this would allow any practitioner to increase his or her range of competences by both acquiring new ones and by lifting the standard of those already attained.

We wanted to try to account for worker motivation as a key factor that might affect the success of an intervention to improve implementation of health worker practices in eight district hospitals in Kenya. In the absence of available tools, we therefore aimed to develop a tool that could enable a rapid measurement of motivation at baseline and at subsequent points during the 18-month intervention study. [from abstract]

The last two decades has seen an explosion of institutions involved in the training of health personnel. This is possibly because of the huge demand of human resources of health (HRH) not only in Nepal, but worldwide. Various grades of HRH are going out of the country and seeking their livelihood elsewhere. [from abstract]

There is a serious shortage of health professionals in rural and remote areas in Australia and world wide. The purpose of this article was to add to existing information about allied health students, particularly occupational therapy students, and rural and remote practice by reviewing the literature on occupational therapy students’ perceptions of rural and remote practice. A variety of influencing factors were identified, as were the main characteristics of rural practice in relation to the future employment of students. [abstract]

Regional Australia is critically short of registered nurses (RNs) due to an ageing nursing workforce and difficulty in attracting new staff. It is recognised that rural background is the most influential factor shaping a health professional’s decision to practise in regional areas. Because of this, Charles Sturt University offered a bachelor of nursing by distance education (DE), enabling rural and remote enrolled nurses (ENs)to upgrade their qualifications to RN. However, despite the flexible study mode offered, many rural and remote ENs were reluctant to progress to university study.