Evaluations & Reviews

This technical brief focuses on issues around health worker motivation, job satisfaction, incentives, retention and performance. [from author]

The Capacity Project has made specific technical contributions to shape and advance the human resources management professional development agenda at the global, regional and country level since 2005. This brief describes the rationale, process, methodology and some of the results of key approaches that the Project and its collaborating partners developed and implemented in sub-Saharan Africa. [from author]

This brief provides a retrospective view of the Project’s contributions and recommendations in the area of global partnering. [from author]

This brief includes the results of the Project’s performance support (PS) interventions, and discusses factors that contributed to those results. The brief shares the common intervention model, analyzes the variations in content, context and methods of the interventions and discusses how similarities and differences played a role in the results. Finally, the brief includes recommendations for implementing and scaling up PS interventions. [from author]

As the global community wrestles with human resources for health issues, faith-based organizations (FBOs) are a vital source of health worker production and promising practices. This brief describes how during the past five years the Capacity Project has worked to increase the number of countries in which FBOs are building national capacity in HRH. [adapted from author]

The goals of the Capacity Project’s Strengthening Health Professional Associations Initiative were: to promote high standards of practice; to help provide the skills for associations to advocate more effectively for the needs of clients and providers;and to form networks among professionals and professional associations. [from author]

This brief provides an overview of results from a qualitative evaluation study of the Capacity Project’s HRIS strengthening in Swaziland, Uganda and Rwanda. In addition, it draws on results from a regional workshop on data-driven decision-making in Tanzania hosted by the Capacity Project in collaboration with ECSA-HC and WHO. [from author]

The Learning for Performance (LFP) approach is a systematic instructional design process and set of practical tools designed to yield more efficient training that focuses on what is essential for health workers to do their jobs, while addressing the factors that ensure application of new skills on the job. [from author]

This brief reviews how the Capacity Project addressed gender discrimination and inequality in HRH through its institutional mechanisms, approaches and tools as well as in country-level implementation. [from author]

This report outlines the work done by the Capacity Project to strengthen human resources to implement quality health programming in developing countries, focusing on: improving workforce planning and leadership; developing better education and training programs; and strengthening systems to support workforce performance. [adapted from author]

The objective of this study was to analyse in what way HRH recruitment, deployment and retention at the district level are influenced by external funding; and to what extent this is in line with national and district policies and strategies. [from abstract]

Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is severe competition for personnel and staff time between various health programmes and between public and private providers. Such competition is reinforced by the vertical nature of various funding mechanisms supported by bilateral donors, international NGOs and global initiatives. The objective of this study was to analyse in what way HRH recruitment, deployment and retention at the district level are influenced by externally funded programmes. [from summary]

We carried out a literature review of studies using discrete choice experiments to investigate human resources issues related to health workers, both in developed and developing countries. Ten studies were found that used discrete choice experiments to investigate the job preferences of health care providers. The use of discrete choice experiments techniques enabled researchers to determine the relative importance of different factors influencing health workers’ choices. [from abstract]

This review provides a comprehensive overview of the most important studies addressing the recruitment and retention of doctors to rural and remote areas of Australia. [adapted from abstract]

This guide details efforts to promote workforce sustainability by recognizing the need for a flexible healthcare workforce with skills to match patient and client needs while ensuring Tasmania keeps pace with international health workforce developments. [adapted from introduction]

The purpose of this study was to explore the role and importance of human resources for the scaling up of health services in low income countries. In two case studies [of Chad and Tanzania], we investigated the size, composition and structure of the current health work force; produced estimates of future human resource availability; estimated the quantity of human resources required significantly to scale up priority interventions towards 2015; and compared human resource availability and human resource requirements. [from introduction]

This paper describes the results of a study comparing the effectiveness of web-based and face-to-face continuing education methods in improving nurses' knowledge about AIDS. [adapted from abstract]

Maintenance and expansion of the future pharmacy workforce is essential for addressing the worldwide shortage of pharmacists. [adapted from abstract]

This article provides an evaluation of an intervention using the Health Workers for Change initiative for improving the relationship between nurses and parents on a pediatric ward in a busy regional hospital in Tanzania. [adapted 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]

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]

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]

The Health Metrics Network (HMN) was launched in 2005 to help countries and other partners improve global health by strengthening the systems that generate health-related information for evidence-based decision-making. HMN is a global health partnership focused on the core requirements of health system strengthening in low and low-middle income countries. To help meet these requirements and advance global health, there is an urgent need to coordinate and align partners around an agreed-upon framework for developing and strengthening health information systems. [adapted from introduction]

This report evaluates the educational effects of a clinically integrated e-learning course for teaching basic evidence-based medicine among postgraduates compared to a traditional lecture-based course of equivalent content. [adapted from abstract]

The study used a literature review and field research to obtain data on strategies for the retention of health workers in various institutions in Kenya.

Improving health workers’ performance is vital for achieving the Millennium Development Goals. In the literature on human resource management interventions to improve health workers’ performance in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), hardly any attention has been paid to the question how HRM interventions might bring about outcomes and in which contexts. Our aim was to explore if realist review of published primary research provides better insight into the functioning of interventions in LMIC. [abstract]

Currently, a wide variety of community health workers are active in many antiretroviral treatment delivery sites. This article investigates whether present community health worker programmes for antiretroviral treatment are taking into account the lessons learnt from past experiences with community health worker programmes in primary health care and to what extent they are seizing the new antiretroviral treatment-specific opportunities. [from abstract]

Retention continues to be a serious challenge in the human resources for health crisis. There is increasingly widespread commitment to initiatives to attract and retain skilled workers, especially in rural areas. The purpose of this brief is to update and document some contributions made from 2005 to 2008 in the area of worker retention. [from author]

The Ministry of Health and Medical Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran has undertaken a reform of its health system, in which-lower level managers are given new roles and responsibilities in a decentralized system. To support these efforts, a series of courses for health managers and trainers was developed. A total of seven short training courses were implemented, and a detailed evaluation of the courses was undertaken to guide future development of the training programs. [adapted from abstract]

The goal of the assessment was to review the quality of HIV care, antiretroviral treatment and tuberculosis services provided in private-for-profits in Uganda in order to generate appropriate recommendations and inform the development of a strategy to improve the quality of those services. [from author]