Service Delivery

In Thailand, family practice was developed primarily through a small number of self-styled family practitioners, who were dedicated to this professional field without having benefited from formal training in the specific techniques of family practice. In the context of a predominantly hospital-based health care system, much depends on their personal motivation and commitment to this area of medicine. The purpose of this paper is to compare the responsiveness, degree of patient-centredness, adequacy of therapeutic decisions and the cost of care in 37 such self-styled family practices, i.e. practices run by doctors who call themselves family practitioners, but have not been formally trained, and in 37 conventional public hospital outpatient departments (OPDs), 37 private clinics and 37 private hospital OPDs.

This report presents a comprehensive analysis of the human resources for health (HRH) currently available and required to reach the targets set by the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in both the public sector and the faith-based organizations (FBOs) in Kenya. A stratified convenience sample of health facilities at all levels of care (primary, secondary, tertiary) in each of the eight provinces was selected for the assessment. Detailed information on human resources and provision of services related to HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis (TB), malaria, maternal health, and child health was collected.

This manual is a collection of adaptable tools and guidelines designed to help clinic supervisors and clinic managers achieve objective improvements in the quality of health care. The manual is especially useful for managers supervising integrated health services, who, on any given day, may be called on to support the provision of a full range of primary health services. The manual is designed to complement more detailed standard operating procedures that may be in use for specific services, for example, antiretroviral therapy.

GRHAM is a CCIH initiative, in collaboration with numerous partners, to increase the awareness of Faith-based Organizations (FBOs) in providing essential health services around the world. GRHAM strives to put FBOs and Christian Health Associations (CHAs) “on the map” to improve networking, including collaboration with and between christian health associations, medical missions, ministries of health and multilateral donors. [from website description]

In recent years, a number of specific strategies for improving health services and strengthening health systems have been consistently advocated. In order to advise governments, WHO commissioned this exploratory study to examine more closely the track record of these strategies in twelve low-income countries. [author’s description]

The tools and guidelines collected in this book will assist health program managers, policymakers, and leaders to assess the impact of HIV/AIDS on the health workforce and its capacity to deliver and scale up HIV/AIDS services. The book provides materials to help decision-makers develop a strategy to mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS, for both a short-term emergency response and a longer-term plan to strengthen HRM systems. This compilation also includes a tool developed by the World Health Organization to help HIV/AIDS programs to achieve a more sustainable workforce appropriately trained to provide ART.

Mystery clients are trained people (usually community members) who visit program facilities in the assumed role of clients, and then report (by completing a survey or through an interview) on their experience. They might be used in an effort to avoid the bias in the service delivery process that often results from having service transactions observed. Mystery clients can also serve to gather a sufficient number of observations of service transactions when the actual volume of service visits is low. [publisher’s description]

This paper analyzes the present situation of general practitioners in the Thai health care system and the conditions under which their contribution could be strengthened. [from abstract]

The objective of this study was to describe the profile of community health workers - health promoters, traditional birth attendants and traditional healers - in rural Quechua communities from Ayacucho, Peru.

An approach to evidence-based policy development has been launched in Ghana which bridges the gap between research and programme implementation. The Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) Initiative has employed strategies tested in the successful Navrongo experiment to guide national health reforms that mobilize volunteerism, resources, and cultural institutions for supporting community-based primary health care.

All decentralization initiatives require making changes in the structure of the agency or organization, which means making changes in how the work gets done. It means developing new management systems, training staff in the skills that they will need to perform in their new roles, designing or modifying service delivery systems, and developing strategies for enhancing the long-term sustainability of the program.

Specific programs for selected diseases are an important component of the national and international health agenda. But in many developing countries, such programs fail to reach their full potential because of either insufficient implementation capacity or the lack of an integrated approach. For disease control programs to work, attention must be paid to human resources management.

This paper explores human resources constraints with regards to specific disease control programs, and provides an inventory of strategies to overcome these constraints. The paper is an edited version of the report on the meeting of the working group “Priority Diseases,” one of the seven working groups of the Joint Learning Initiative. The Joint Learning Initiative was set up to explore strategies to improve health services delivery through human resources management. [Publisher’s description]

Results of a study of human resources and antiretroviral therapy (ART) at 41 sites in 11 countries, presented in three sections: an overview of service delivery models for ART, a more in-depth account of the systems studied and a report of an international workshop on HRH and ART delivery.

This report presents findings from a nationwide Expenditure Tracking and Service Delivery Survey implemented in Mozambique between August and October 2002. The study focuses on the primary health care system, which is frequently the only source of health care for most Mozambicans. The report covers a broad set of issues, including institutional context, budget management, cost recovery, allocation and distribution of drugs, human resources, infrastructure and equipment, and service outputs. [from abstract]

The definition of the ideal numbers and distribution of human resources required for control of road traffic injury (RTI) is not as advanced as for other health problems. We can nonetheless identify functions that need to be addressed across the spectrum of injury control. [from abstract]