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Taking action to improve gender equity in health and to address women’s rights to health is one of the most direct and potent ways to reduce health inequities and ensure effective use of health resources. This report discusses the gender aspects of health such as how the work that women do as providers of health care within families can be better supported so as to reduce their burdens and promote their own health. Section vii.1.2 (p. 82) discusses women as health care provides, section vii.2.1 (p. 87) focuses on how to improve access to health care from the provider side such as gender awareness in medical education.

The objective of this study was to examine how the physical environment, along with other factors such as culture and social support, impact the health and safety of the care team, effectiveness of the healthcare team in providing care and preventing medical errors, and patient and practitioner satisfaction with the experience of giving and receiving care. [adapted from abstract]

The health and well-being of the health workforce and the quality of the healthcare work environment has a profound impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of healthcare services. This resource identifies priority actions that are known to improve the workplace and that can be implemented quickly and efficiently. The actions focus on both system wide and organizational performance improvement on specific areas relating to quality work life. [from executive summary]

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]

Training in communication skills for health professionals is important, but there are substantial barriers to individual in-person training for practicing clinicians. This study evaluated the feasibility and desirability of online training and sought suggestions for future courses. [adapted from abstract]

The objective of this study was to assess whether traditional birth attendants, drug-shop vendors, community reproductive-health workers, or adolescent peer mobilizers could administer intermittent preventive treatment (IPTp) for malaria with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine to pregnant women. The study concludes that the use of the guideline with adequate training significantly improved correctness of malaria treatment with chloroquine at home. Adoption of this mode of intervention is recommended to improve compliance with drug use at home. The applicability for deploying artemisinin-based combination therapy at the community level needs to be investigated.

Many Nigerian children with malaria are treated at home. Treatments are mostly incorrect, due to caregivers’ poor knowledge of appropriate and correct dose of drugs. A comparative study was carried out in two rural health districts in southwest Nigeria to determine the effectiveness of a guideline targeted at caregivers, in the treatment of febrile children using chloroquine. [from abstract]

Gender issues are important to address during medical education, however research about the implementation of gender in medical curricula reports that there are obstacles. The aim of this study was to explore physician teachers’ attitudes to gender issues. [from abstract]

This article discusses the implementation of training programmes in field epidemiology as a strategy for improving the number and quality of health workers. [adapted from abstract]

The purpose of this study was to assess physicians’ knowledge, attitude and global comfort in caring for patients with AIDS (PWA), to determine the sociodemographic variables that could influence physicians and to identify any relationship between their knowledge, attitude and comfort. The study reinforced the need for an ongoing education focused on experiential learning and professional socialization in order to influence physicians’ attitude and enhance their feeling of comfort when caring for PWA. [adapted from abstract]

The Capacity Project helped to organize and facilitate a regional Human Resources for Health (HRH) Action Workshop in Accra, Ghana, September 23-28, 2007. Participants came together with the overall purpose of exchanging knowledge and best practices in planning, developing and supporting the health workforce in order to improve health workforce management capacity and strategic development at the country level.

This article describes an intervention for training traditional birth attendants and integrating them into an improved health care system, which was proven to be achievable and effective in reducing perinatal mortality. This model could result in large improvements in perinatal and maternal health in developing countries. [adapted from abstract]

In the rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, the majority of young children affected by malaria have no access to formal health services. Home treatment through mothers of febrile children supported by mother groups and local health workers has the potential to reduce malaria morbidity and mortality. [from author]

This article describes the experience of Guatemalan students at Cuba’s Latin American Medical School. The students’ education emphasizes health problems and diseases characterizing the epidemiological situation in their home country and in-depth courses in disaster management, as well as clinical experience in Guatemala. [adapted from author]

This article describes the efforts within the Cuban medical system to collaborate with health authorities around the globe to develop medical education programs to train such urgently-needed professionals with curricula formulated to meet international standards and local health needs. Special emphasis is placed on the assistance that Cuba provided to Gambia in establishing a medical school in that country. [from author]

This article describes the Cuban medical education system. The role of Cuban physicians internationally is discussed, as well as the placement of international students in Cuban medical schools.

The world’s 1,691 medical schools and 5,492 nursing schools are not producing enough graduates to cover the massive global deficit of doctors, nurses, and midwives. One scaling-up initiative addressing these critical shortages is Cuba’s Latin American Medical School. This article describes those efforts. [adapted from introduction]

The Institute of Medicine’s Academy of Science has recommended that medical schools incorporate information on CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) into required medical school curricula so that graduates will be able to competently advise their patients in the use of CAM. The report states a need to study models of systems that integrate CAM and allopathic medicine. The authors present Cuba’s health care system as one such model and describe how CAM (or natural and traditional medicine) is integrated into all levels of clinical care and medical education in Cuba. The authors conclude that there is much to learn from the Cuban experience to inform U.S.

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

This article discusses the development of a decision framework to assist policymakers in choosing and designing effective incentive systems. The researchers identified several models that have proven to be effective in changing or enabling a health provider’s performance.

Improving service delivery for the poor is an important way to help the poor lift themselves out of poverty. This resource presents and evaluates tools and techniques to measure service delivery and increase quality in health and education.

This brief reports on a project through Cambodia’s Ministry of Health which contracted health services to NGOs. Contracting NGOs to manage the primary health care system was found to be an effective means to increase service coverage and achieve a more pro-poor distribution of services in rural areas of Cambodia. [adapted from introduction]

This material looks in detail at the preparation of a Nursing Act and is designed to offer guidance on the process of turning policy change in nursing into meaningful and effective legislation. This document has been prepared primarily to assist countries/jurisdictions who are either preparing legislation relating to nursing for the first time, or revising their existing legislation. It is intended to be used by nursing professionals who may not be familiar with the process of making or changing legislation.

The International Nurses Day Kit celebrates and illuminates the nursing role in primary health care. It is for nurses, planners, policy makers, educators, managers, regulators, researchers, national nurses associations and any other stakeholder committed to delivering quality care and serving communities through primary health care. The report analyse the evolution of primary health care, articulates nursing roles, highlights many examples of nurses delivering primary health care and provides a glimpse into the future. [adapted from introduction]

The success of primary health care programmes in Thailand over the past three decades can be attributed not only to medical advances but to the role of community health volunteers. Buddhist monks and their temples have been strongly involved in health promotion and education, particularly in remote, rural communities. [from introduction]

This editorial describes the widespread recruitment of health workers from sub-Saharan Africa to developed nations by recruiting agencies. The authors describe international efforts to criminalize this practice and express concern at the continued practice of recruitment.

This article describes the efforts of the Indian government to decrease maternal mortality by improving birthing conditions. The scheme created a partnership with the private sector and an NGO to provide free birth care to poor families through contracts with private obstetricians practicing in rural areas. The authors conclude that public-private partnerships can rapidly scale up the availability of human resources for skilled birth-attendance and emergency obstetric care to the poor in a very short time. [adapted from author]

This article outlines the challenges facing the surgical workforce in Africa. Funding priorities in Africa typically favor infectious diseases, and surgery and perioperative care have been neglected, even though essential surgical care at district hospitals is more cost effective than some other highly prioritized interventions, such as antiretroviral therapy for HIV. There is a need to integrate surgical and anesthetic training programs so health personnel, particularly in rural areas, can treat the full range of diseases appropriate to that level of care. [adapted from author]

This article discusses the requirements for improving the experience of health care workers in fragile states. Efforts are needed to establish performance-management systems, to support promotion based on merit, and to provide wider opportunities for professional development. These efforts must be accompanied by measures to restructure the workforce (in some cases radically), thus matching staffing levels with agreed norms and to redress imbalances between rural and urban areas and between different levels within the system. [adapted from author]

This article identifies human resources for health policy options in low and middle income countries, and assesses the effectiveness of these policy options. The authors conclude that there is a need for more systematic reviews on the effects of policy options to improve human resources for health in countries with low and middle incomes, for assessments of any interventions that policy makers introduce to plan and manage human resources for health, and for other research to aid policy makers in these countries. [adapted from author]