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The Effects of Health Worker Motivation and Job Satisfaction on Turnover Intention in Ghana: A Cross-Sectional Study

The study explored the effects of motivation and job satisfaction on turnover intention and how motivation and satisfaction can be improved by district health managers in order to increase retention of health workers. [from abstract]

Evaluating the Coverage and Cost of Community Health Worker Programs in Nampula Province in Mozambique

In 2012, Pathfinder conducted a study to explore whether CHWs who are intended to promote family planning as part of an integrated package of services do communicate with beneficiaries about family planning, and what actions women take based on these messages. The study also explored whether CHWs are reaching the poor, marginalized and vulnerable, and examined the costs of implementing the CHW component of the SCIP project. [from executive summary]

Comprehensive Reproductive Health and Family Planning Curriculum: Module 11: MVA for the Treatment of Incomplete Abortion

This training manual prepares health workers to counsel women who come to a facility for treatment of an incomplete or septic abortion and to assess and manage the complications of incomplete and septic abortions. It includes information on preparation of MVA equipment, infection prevention procedures, processing MVA equipment for reuse, pain control, the MVA procedure, management of complications of the MVA procedure, and the introduction of comprehensive PAC services in a clinical setting.

Adapting Continuing Medical Education for Post-Conflict Areas: Assessment in Nagorno Karabagh - A Qualitative Study

One of the major challenges in the current century is the increasing number of post-conflict states where infrastructures are debilitated. The dysfunctional health care systems in post-conflict settings are putting the lives of the populations in these zones at increased risk. [from abstract]

New Analysis Shows How the Private Sector Can Help Sustain HIV Responses

Recent analysis by the SHOPS project shows that the private health sector could help country governments sustain national HIV responses. SHOPS used national health accounts data to track how HIV funds flow through the health systems in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, and Namibia, and identified ways that donors and the government can better work with the private health sector. [from introduction]

Islam and Family Planning: Changing Perceptions of Health Care Providers and Medical Faculty in Pakistan

Training health care providers and medical college faculty about the supportive nature of Islam toward
family planning principles addressed their misconceptions and enhanced their level of comfort in providing
family planning services and teaching the subject. [from synopsis]

Increasing Access to Family Planning in Ghana through Policy Change: Task-Sharing to Enable Auxiliary Nurses to Provide Contraceptive Implant Services

Health care is labor intensive and managers strive to identify a mix of staff that can safely deliver a range of services using available resources. In many developing countries,primary-level workers, auxiliary staff, and community health workers (CHWs) are being trained to assume roles and perform functions traditionally reserved for mid- or high-level cadres of health workers as a means of optimizing the number and capacity of available providers.

Building Health Literate Organizations: A Guidebook to Achieving Organizational Change

This guidebook is intended to complement the many excellent health literacy resources that already exist and are emerging every day, and to help organizations of any size use them to become health literate health care organizations. Health literate health care organizations “make it easier for people to navigate, understand, and use information and services to take care of their health. [from introductions]

Capacity Building of Institutions in the Health Sector: Review of Experiences in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Jharkhand.

This report documents the efforts and contributions made by USAID through the Innovations in Family Planning Services (IFPS) Project towards capacity building and strengthening of public and private institutions in the health sector
in India. The report highlights the support rendered at the national level and in three Indian states: Uttar
Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jharkhand. [from introduction]

Context-specific, Evidence-Based Planning for Scale-Up of Family Planning Services to Increase Progress to MDG 5: Health Systems Research

Local health planners are in a prime position to devise feasible context-specific activities to overcome
constraints and increase met need for family planning to accelerate progress towards MDG 5. [from abstract]

eLearning Africa: 2014 Post-Conference Report

The official report for the 9th International Conference on ICT for Development, Education & Training, which took place from May 28 to 30, 2014 in Kampala, Uganda. [adapted from publisher]

Why Do Health Labour Market Forces Matter?

This paper describes how labour market analysis can contribute to a better understanding of the factors behind human resource constraints in the health sector and to a more effective design of policies and interventions to address them. [from abstract]

Straight to the Point: Assessing Partner Capacity Building Needs

This tool helps users conduct a concise assessment of a partner organization’s (or potential partner’s) strengths and weaknesses, helping to identify areas where technical assistance will be needed to successfully implement a project. The tool addresses key capacity areas including: human capacity, basic management capacity, M&E capacity, absorptive capacity, and community connectedness. The tool is meant to serve as a guide for interviewing multiple stakeholders at a partner or subgrantee organization. [from introduction]

Innovations to Reduce Hospital Readmissions and Avoidable Hospitalizations from Nursing Homes: Implications for the Health Workforce

The study was conducted to better understand the roles and functions of the health workforce responsible for managing patient transitions to and from hospitals and nursing homes in New York’s downstate region to reduce the number of readmissions and to improve care transitions. [adapted from introduction]

Achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Africa: Harnessing E-Learning Potentials

This paper explores how e-learning is situated in the drive towards realization of MDGs [Millennium Development Goals] in the African continent.

The Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI): Innovations in Nursing and Midwifery Education

The Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI) was established in 2011 by the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in response to key capacity-building challenges facing preservice nursing and midwifery education in Sub-Saharan Africa. NEPI has formed partnerships with governments and key stakeholders in Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, and Zambia and supports 19 nursing and midwifery education institutions and 1 nursing council.

Community-Based Education Programs in Africa: Faculty Experience Within the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) Network

This paper examines the various models, challenges, and evaluative efforts of community-based education (CBE) programs at Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) schools and makes recommendations to strengthen those programs in the African context. [from abstract]

The Medical Education Partnership Initiative: Report of an eLearning Strategic Plan Development Workshop

In collaboration with the MEPI eLearning technical working group, CapacityPlus and the MEPI coordinating center organized and conducted a workshop to complete draft eLearning strategic plans for MEPI-supported institutions, share knowledge and experiences, and build a supportive network of eLearning collaborators. The workshop, which was held in Gaborone, Botswana, February 24–27, 2014, brought together representatives from 11 MEPI-supported schools and one MEPI consortium. [from publisher]

Transforming and Scaling Up Health Workforce Education and Training for Health Equity

CapacityPlus hosted a knowledge-sharing and dissemination event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on March 18. The three-hour program featured presentations on key messages from the 2014 Prince Mahidol Award Conference, which focused on transformative learning for health equity; the World Health Organization’s recommendations for health worker education and retention; and innovative approaches and tools developed by CapacityPlus in collaboration with global and national partners.

Updates on the Agenda for Transforming Health Worker Education and Training for Health Equity

This presentation was given at the CapacityPlus knowledge-sharing and dissemination event, Transforming and Scaling Up Health Workforce Education and Training for Health Equity, held on March 18, 2014, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. [from publisher]

Rural Health Worker Retention Tools

Many countries struggle to attract and retain sufficient numbers and types of health workers to provide quality services in rural and remote areas. To encourage country ownership and advocate for use of data for policy-making, the USAID-funded CapacityPlus project developed several tools, including the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit; a companion software product, iHRIS Retain, developed in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO); and a discrete choice experiment user guide, developed in collaboration with the World Bank and the WHO. [from introduction]

In-Service Training Improvement Framework Launched at the Third Global Forum on Human Resources for Health

Training is clearly an important contribution towards the development and maintenance of health worker competencies for delivering quality services – but how can we make training more effective, efficient and sustainable? We gathered participants from around the world at a side session to harvest and share experiences, strategies and lessons learnt.
So what did we learn? We’ve conveniently packaged together the questions we discussed along with some of the main lessons learnt here. [adapted from authors]

Ethiopia: An Emerging Family Planning Success Story

From 1990 to 2011, contraceptive use in Ethiopia increased nine fold and the total fertility rate fell from 7.0 to 4.8. What are the main elements of this success? We posit that the four most significant factors are: political will, generous donor support, non-governmental and public–private partnerships, and the government’s establishment of a network of health extension workers. In this study, we look at these factors and how their interaction increased the proportion of women having both the desire to use and ability to access contraceptives. [adapted from abstract]

Focus on Community-based Family Planning: Partnership with Uganda Ministry of Health

The Ugandan Government has an ambitious goal to reduce unmet need for family planning (FP) from its current 34% to 10% over the next 10 years. This brief shares experiences and lessons from capacity building for Family Planning at the national and district levels in Uganda.[adapted from introduction]

Improving Access to Family Planning Services in Rural Areas

Family planning (FP) services have been available in Nepal for over 50 years, most extensively from the public sector health system, with nongovernmental agencies involved from the very beginning. These services are largely delivered by
facility-based service providers, except for the distribution of condoms and pills and, occasionally,
injectables. Community workers such as VHWs and MCHWs could potentially fill the gap if they were given the necessary knowledge and skills. [adapted from resource]

'I Am Who I Serve'—Community Health Workers In Family Planning Programs

For decades, family planning programs and other public health programs have utilized community health workers (CHWs) as a way to reach and serve disadvantaged populations, often immigrants leery of government sponsored programs.Despite decades of experience, however, and a substantial body of evidence documenting their effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, these efforts continue to be hampered by the lack of a dedicated funding stream—a problem now being addressed by individual states and potentially by a little-noticed provision in the federal health care reform legislation that could provi

Developing and Strengthening Community Health Worker Programs at Scale: A Reference Guide and Case Studies for Program Managers and Policy Makers

The Reference Guide has many practical examples from CHW programs around the world. The contents are in four sections and contain a total of 16 chapters covering such topics as a history of CHW programs, planning, governance and financing, national coordination and partnerships, roles and tasks, recruitment, training, supervision, motivation and incentives, relations with the community and health systems, scaling up, and measurement and data use. [from introduction]

See resource on Recruitment of Community Health Workers

Recruitment of Community Health Workers

This item is chapter eight in the book Developing and Strengthening Community Health Worker Programs at Scale. This chapter will help readers to consider key questions, recommendations, and challenges for CHW [Community Health Worker] recruitment planning and implementation, including selection, resource availability, and addressing CHW retention. [adapted from introduction]

Effects of Health-System Strengthening on Under-5, Infant, and Neonatal Mortality: 11-year Provincial-Level Time-Series Analyses in Mozambique

Knowledge of the relation between health-system factors and child mortality could help to inform health policy in low-income and middle-income countries. We aimed to quantify modifiable health-system factors and their relation with provincial-level heterogeneity in under-5, infant, and neonatal mortality over time in Mozambique. [from abstract]

A window of opportunity for reform in post-conflict settings? The case of Human Resources for Health policies in Sierra Leone, 2002–2012

With this aim, the study looks at the development of policies on human resources for health (HRH) in Sierra Leone over the decade after the conflict (2002–2012). [from abstract]