Education and Training

Various tools and approaches can help accelerate the process of providing health care workers with the skill sets needed to tackle current health care needs. To this end, the Capacity Project has identified and categorized existing tools and approaches that support health cadres in learning new skills, especially in the area of HIV/AIDS. In this paper, we briefly describe and give examples of these potential resources, providing web links (where available) in the appendices. [from introduction]

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]

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.

This study assessed the impact of management training in the performance of managers from agencies in Bangladesh delivering primary healthcare services. [from abstract]

This toolkit includes a collection of HRM resources and links assembled for the Global Health 2005 conference. Most of the resources are in Microsoft Word format and provide guidance on how to develop a variety of HRM documents or processes. Topics covered include supervision, hiring and recruitment, HR policies, and HIV Workplace Programs and training. [publisher’s description]

What makes one training experience better than another? Effective training can help providers of family planning/reproductive health (FP/RH) services to improve their performance. This handbook summarizes the tasks that should be completed at each stage of training to ensure an effective training course.

This paper combines the literature on public health, on economics of health and on economics of technological innovation to discuss the peculiarities of labour in the health care sector. The health care system has a distinctive characteristic from other economic sectors: it is the intersection between social welfare and innovation systems. The relationship between technological innovation and cost in the health care sector is surveyed. Finally, the Brazilian case is discussed as an example of a developing country. The peculiarities of labour in the health care sector suggest the need to recognize the worth of sectoral labour and to cease to treat it separately.

This research sheds light on the nature, design and provision of institutional services for providing training to the premier community health service providers in the public sector in Bangladesh. Virtually no major study exists on the training of the FWVs in the country. The methodology of the research mainly consists of a personal interview and questionnaire survey, covering the concerned trainers and officials of the major public health administration and training institutions of the country, including the National Institute of Population Research and Training, the Family Planning Directorate and the Family Welfare Visitors’ Training Institute.

This issue introduces Training Impact Evaluation (TIE), a process designed to help managers identify and strengthen the links between training and staff performance. The issue describes the benefits of conducting a Training Impact Evaluation using a team approach and takes you step-by-step through the TIE process. The issue also offers practical suggestions for collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data on trainee performance in the workplace. It concludes with suggestions for ways that managers can use the information to make recommendations to decision makers, to improve training courses, or to seek management solutions to performance problems.

When health care workers participating in training are able to transfer their newly acquired knowledge and skills to their jobs, higher levels of performance and sustained improvements in service delivery are likely to result. A joint publication of PRIME II and JHPIEGO, Transfer of Learning uses a dynamic matrix to outline specific steps for supervisors, trainers, learners and co-workers to follow before, during and after a learning intervention to promote the transfer of learning. PRIME II has also created an interactive website based on Transfer of Learning.

This paper, aimed primarily at DFID advisers and health sector analysts, will attempt to map out selected issues relating to the planning and management of human resources by combining an international perspective with issues and trends emerging from individual countries. HR issues and challenges have been grouped into four broad objectives that poor countries, donors and advisers will need to address simultaneously over the next decade and beyond.