Latest Resources

Working for an Accessible, Motivated and Supported Health Workforce

Whether one is ill, in need of urgent care but denied access to essential services due to the absence of a health worker – or looking from the perspective of an over-stretched health worker who is inadequately equipped and supported, and brings barely poverty-level wages back to the family – the crisis in human resources for health (HRH) is an old problem which has developed right in front of us, and has now been exposed and accentuated by fresh forces. [author’s description]

Romania, Reaching the Poor: Scaling Up Integrated Family Planning Services

This case study examines the scale up of family planning services in Romania through primary care providers. It disucces the process, the challenges, the successful results and the lessons learned.

Reincentivizing: a New Theory on Work and Work Absence

Work capacity correlates weakly to disease concepts, which in turn are insufficient to explain sick leave behavior. With data mainly from Sweden, a welfare state with high sickness absence rates, our aim was to develop an explanatory theory of how to understand and deal with work absence and sick leave. In this paper we present a theory of work incentives and how to deal with work absence. [from abstract]

Ophthalmology Human Resource Projections: Are We Heading for a Crisis in the Next 15 Years?

This manpower projection was undertaken by using the Canadian Medical Association Physician Resource Evaluation Template. This spreadsheet-based stock and flow model incorporates key parameters in estimating physician supply over the next 2 decades and enables planners to create various scenarios to test the effects on future supply. [author’s description]

Comprehensive Reproductive Health and Family Planning Training Curriculum: Module 14: Training of Trainers

This training manual is designed for use as part of the comprehensive family planning and reproductive health training of service providers. It is designed to be used to train physicians, nurses, and midwives. Sessions in this Training of Trainers (TOT) module include discussions, identification of trainer’s own learning style, training exercises, conducting training needs assessments, developing action plans, developing visual aids, and training practice sessions which are videotaped and critiqued. [from purpose]

Advanced Training of Trainers

This training manual is designed to prepare trainers who already have skills as reproductive health trainers to proceed to a higher level of training implementation. This module prepares them to conduct a training needs assessment, develop detailed plans for training, develop and pilot test a training curriculum, conduct training using more advanced training techniques, conduct training follow up and evaluate training. [publisher’s description]

Communication Action Groups: Promoting Broader Discussion of Reproductive Health

In 1996, the REWARD Project identified a need for effective interventions to increase women’s communication about reproductive health among themselves and with their husbands. Project staff formed women’s groups, called Communication Action Groups (CAGs), in three rural districts. The project provides group leaders with training on communication, leadership, group dynamics, condom use, condom negotiating skills, and HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections (STIs).

Malawi Case Study: Choice, Not Chance: a Repositioning Family Planning Case Study

This report evaluates the success of a program to improve family planning services in Malawi. It discusses the importance of community-based distribution, i.e. mobile clinics and community health workers, to the success of family planning in the country since so much of the population is rural.

Reproductive Health Training for Primary Providers: A SourceBook for Curriculum Development

This modular training resource intended to help trainers integrate aspects of reproductive health (RH) into training curricula.

Lessons Learned from the Benin HIV/AIDS Prevention Program (BHAPP)

This report evaluates the BHAPP project including an analysis of its service and communication activities for outreach and capacity strengthening of personnel in 23 health centers to diagnose and treat STIs and use STI case management as a referral point for HIV testing. It also discusses the effectiveness of the project’s policy work at the central level.

Sexual and Reproductive Health for HIV-Positive Women and Adolescent Girls: Manual for Trainers and Programme Managers

The goal of this training is to enable health workers to address the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs of HIV-positive women and adolescent girls by offering comprehensive SRH services within their own particular service-delivery setting. [from introduction]

Staff Training and Ambulatory Tuberculosis Treatment Outcomes: a Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial in South Africa

The objective of this study was to assess whether adding a training intervention for clinic staff to the usual DOTS strategy (the internationally recommended control strategy for tuberculosis (TB)) would affect the outcomes of TB treatement in primary care clinics with treatemet success rates below 70%. [from abstract]

Study of Health Human Resources in Nova Scotia 2003

This report provides a comprehensive picture of HRH in Nova Scotia, a snapshot of the number of people working in each health occupation and health care setting; education and training characteristics; age, gender and other demographics, and wokplace injury and illness informatio.

Reproductive Health Manual for Trainers of Community Health Workers

This manual was developed to help organizations who provide reproductive health services through the community-based distribution approach to train their community health workers in reproductive health.

Black and Minority Ethnic and Internationally Recruited Nurses: Results from RCN Employment/Working Well Surveys 2005 and 2002

In order to help improve Royal College of Nursing understanding of the employment experiences of internationally recruited nurses and UK trained black and minority ethnic (BME) nurses, the RCN commissioned a secondary analysis to draw together commentary and analysis from previous surveys.

At Breaking Point: a Survey of the Wellbeing and Working Lives of Nurses in 2005

The RCN commissioned a survey of 6,000 members in 2000 to explore nurses’ wellbeing and working lives. The results subsequently helped shape RCN policy and materials for members on topics such as bullying and harassment, violence, needlestick injury and employee-friendly working practices. Five years later, the RCN has commissioned a second survey looking at a similar range of issues. This report documents the findings of that survey, and describes differences between the 2000 and 2005 survey findings. [introduction]

Health Worker Retention and Migration in East and Southern Africa: Regional Meeting Report

This report is the result of a regional meeting held March 17-19 in Arusha, Tanzania and presents the regional context for work on migration and retention; an overview of the current situation, integrating evidence from background papers and country experiences; and summarizes the discussions held on follow-up work on migration and retention. [adapted from introduction]

Global Health Facts

This tool gives data about number of physicians, nurses, community health workers, midwives, births attended by skilled health personnel and hospital beds by country in user-friendly maps and tables. Click on “Health Workforce & Capacity” to access the data sets.

Creating Healthy Health Care Workplaces in British Columbia: Evidence for Action

The intent of the report is to stimulate creative discussions among [British Colubia’s] health system stakeholders about opportunities for coordinated action on employee and workplace health. The best available evidence suggests that the scope and depth of workplace health challenges today require solutions that go beyond traditional workplace health promotion programs.

Collaborative Practice Among Nursing Teams

This best practice guideline focuses on nursing teams and processes that foster healthy work environments. The focus for the development of this guideline was collaborative practice among nursing teams with the view that this may be a first stage in a multi-staged process that could eventually result in interprofessional guidelines. A healthy work environment for nurses is a practice setting that maximizes the health and well being of nurses, quality patient outcomes and organizational performance. Effective nursing teamwork is essential to the work in health care organizations. [from purpose]

Gender Sensitivity Assessment Tool for FP/RH Curricula

A tool designed to help program and training managers, curriculum designers and trainers facilitate the operationalization and assessment of gender sensitivity during pre- and in-service training of service providers.

Cost Analysis Tool: Simplifying Cost Analysis for Managers and Staff of Health Care Services

Health care organizations often do not know what their costs are and have no simple way of assessing costs on a regular basis… This cost analysis tool involves site administrators and service providers themselves in measuring recurrent direct costs of providing services. [author’s description]

Integrated Community-Based Home Care (ICHC) in South Africa

This report outlines information from a literature review and field research pertaining to the key differences and similarities between the hospice ICHC model and other home-based care models used in South Africa; reviews the core elements of the ICHC model; and highlights best practices of the model. [adapted from introduction]

Community-Based Approaches to HIV Treatment in Resource-Poor Settings

The main objections to the use of [antiretroviral therapies] in less-developed countries have been their high cost and the lack of health infrastructure necessary to use them. We have shown that it is possible to carry out an HIV treatment programme in a poor community in rural Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere.

Systemic Capacity Building: a Hierarchy of Needs

Too often capacity building becomes merely a euphemism referring to little more than training. This paper argues that it is more important to address systemic capacity building, identifying a pyramid of nine separate but interdependent components.