Ethiopia

This study was designed to document the role and experience of health professionals with significant responsibility for human resource management (HRM); identify the challenges that these health professionals face; identify additional skills and knowledge needed by these health professionals to address HRM challenges; solicit recommendations for changes in pre-service and in-service HRM training. [from summary]

This study was undertaken primarily to understand what effect the efforts to integrate family planning and VCT services in health facilities had on health care providers’ work and service delivery practices in two regions of Ethiopia. [from summary]

This study seeks to assess the role of private health facilities and pharmacies in HIV/AIDS service delivery in Ethiopia, and specifically to identify factors that could enable greater involvement of this sector in addressing the HIV epidemic.

This report provides a short summary of the key discussion points from a meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on the 10th and 11th of January 2008. The meeting followed on from the launch of the WHO Guidelines on Task-Shifting and was attended by participants who are actively involved in addressing HRH. [adapted from author]

Ethiopia does not have a sufficient health care workforce to meet the population’s demand for services and the burden of disease. The objective of this project was to assess the usefulness and feasibility of collecting key participant and training information for monitoring and planning of HIV/AIDS services. This paper describes a project that uses training data to follow up with providers after training to assess whether they are still working in HIV/AIDS-related services. [adapted from introduction]

Ethiopia suffers from an acute shortage of health workers at every level, and rural areas in which 85% of the population live have been particularly chronically under-served. The Ministry of Health chose to focus on community level provision, initiating the Health Extension Programme in 2004. This is outlined in the current Health Sector Development Plan, which focuses on both human resource development and the construction and rehabilitation of facilities. [adapted from introduction]

The Mothers’ Support Group empowers mothers and mother-to-be to access peer-based support and make linkages to services such as family planning, infant-feeding, counseling, nutriotional guidance, antiretroviral therapy, prevention of mother-to-child transmission and health institutional delivery. [from author]

Insufficient attention has been paid to understanding what determines the performance of health workers and how they make labor market choices. This paper reports on findings from focus group discussions with both health workers and users of health services in Ethiopia. We describe performance problems identified by both health users and health workers participating in the focus group discussions including absenteeism and shirking, pilfering drugs and materials, informal health care provision and illicit charging, and corruption.

This presentation covers the state of the health workforce in Ethiopia and defines the crisis in health worker coverage including numerous charts and staistics that track the decline in the number of doctors.

This document provides resources on Ethiopia’s experiences with community health worker programs. [from abstract]

Ethiopia’s poor health status is due primarily to communicable diseases, poor nutrition, and lack of access to health services in general and for most of the rural, nomadic pastoralist and fringe areas in particular. In response, the government has launched a Health Extension Program for which training of Health Extension Workers has been started. This study assesses the first year’s training program in terms of its inputs, processes and output. [from abstract]

Review of different documents on human resource for health in Ethiopia was undertaken. Generally there is shortage in number of different groups of professionals, maldistribution of professionals between regions, urban and rural setting, and governmental and non governmental/private organizations. A number of measures are being taken to alleviate these problems. The implications of these for human resource development by 2015 are explored briefly. [adapted from abstract]

Long-Acting Family Planning (LAFP) methods, provide uninterrupted protection to women for 3 to 12 years. But they must be inserted by trained providers in a safe clinical environment. With limited facilities and few providers, widespread implementation of LAFP in Ethiopia requires training of significant numbers of rural providers and developing properly equipped facilities for implant and IUCD insertions. This document describes a training program for family planning. [from author]

In the space of just a few years, close to 300,000 people with HIV have been put onto ART in Ethiopia and Malawi - two of the countries most severely affected by the human resources for health crisis. But while some might suggest that such a rapid scale-up could only have come at the expense of other general health services, Ethiopia and Malawi performed this remarkable feat using HIV/AIDS funding and technical support to launch ambitious and comprehensive human resource plans to strengthen their health sectors overall. [from author]

Thousands of community workers are helping Ethiopia to deliver primary health-care services to people living in rural areas. However, critics say that the training these workers receive is not adequate for them to attend many of the health problems they encounter. [from introduction]

The Private Sector Partnerships-One (PSP-One) project fielded an assessment team to document the state of operations for the Biruh Tesfa network, identify strategies to improve network sustainability, and determine local organizations that could have a role in network management and support. In addition the team was asked to explore opportunities to integrate HIV services into the Biruh Tesfa network. [from abstract]

This brief discusses the Capacity Project’s work to train health workers to help prevent mother to child transmission of HIV.

Following health sector reform, Ethiopia started training new categories of health workers. This study addresses students’ perspectives regarding their training and career plans. This study suggests that the current training programs have serious inadequacies that need to be addressed. [from abstract]

This report details the impact of Pathfinder Interational’s community-based approach to reproductive health and family planning in Ethiopia.

This presentation was given at the First Forum on Human Resources for Health in Kampala. It covers the imbalance in physician deployment in Ethiopia and the lottery system for ensuring coverage in rural areas.

This paper examines recent experiences in Zambia, and Ethiopia that illustrate why policy matters for developing the private health sector and underscoring the need for rational regulatory policies and practices. [author’s description]

This presentation is from PSP-One’s GHC Expert Panel - Expanding Health Service Access, Quality, and Equity in Developing Countries: The Role of the Private Sector. It presents franchise models for delivering family planning and reproductive health services by the private sector.

The Health Service Extension Programme (HSEP) is an innovative approach to addressing the shortfall in health human resources in Ethiopia. It has developed a new cadre of Health Extension Workers (HEWs), who are charged with providing the health and hygiene promotion and some treatment services, which together constitute the bedrock of Ethiopia’s community health system. This study seeks to explore the experience of the HSEP from the perspective of the community who received the service. [from abstract]

To maximize program impact with current resources, integration of Family Planning into existing HIV/AIDS programs is a very cost effective and an excellent point of entry. This is a study of an intervention program focused on initiating and also strengthening existing integration of FP into functional VCT, ART and PMTCT sites. The intervention encompassed an orientation on integration benefits to heads of health facilities; identification of challenges of integration and drawing of plan of action on how to overcome the challenges and improve integration.

Ethiopia is currently one of the countries most seriously affected by HIV/AIDS, with the sixth highest number of infections in the world. This paper discusses how to combat this epidemic. As the country scales up HIV/AIDS services, increased attention is focused on identifying constraints to program expansion. One of the most important constraints is that of human resources. [from publisher’s abstract]

No satisfactory strategy for reducing high child mortality from malaria has yet been established in tropical Africa. The authors compared the effect on under-5 mortality of teaching mothers to promptly provide antimalarials to their sick children at home, with the present community health worker approach. The study concludes that a major reduction in under-5 mortality can be achieved in holoendemic malaria areas through training local mother coordinators to teach mothers to give under-5 children antimalarial drugs. [adapted from abstract]

Geographical imbalances in the health workforce have been a consistent feature of nearly all health systems, especially in developing countries. The authors investigate the willingness to work in a rural area among final year nursing and medical students in Ethiopia. Analyzing data obtained from contingent valuation questions, they find that household consumption and the student’s motivation to help the poor, which is their proxy for intrinsic motivation, are the main determinants of willingness to work in a rural area.