Uganda

The purpose of this study was to investigate the performance of health workers after decentralisation of the health services in Uganda in order to identify and suggest possible areas for improvement. [from abstract]

Uganda has a severe health worker shortage and a high demand for health care services. This study aimed to assess the policy and programmatic implications of task shifting in Uganda. [from abstract]

This study compared the performance of community health workers managing malaria and pneumonia with performance of those managing malaria alone in eastern Uganda and the factors influencing performance. [from abstract]

This impact evaluation was conducted to assess volunteer community health workers’ effect on child morbidity, mortality and to calculate volunteer retention. [from abstract]

Participants in the Human Resources for Health Leadership and Management Course in Uganda share some perspectives on a program designed to help them address health workforce challenges at the district level. [from publisher]

This study investigated preferences for job characteristics among final year medical, nursing, pharmacy, and laboratory students at select universities in Uganda to elicit preferences for attributes of potential job postings they were likely to pursue after graduation. [adapted from abstract]

This study describes the process and cost of training to attain competence of lower level health workers to perform malaria RDTs in a public health system setting in eastern Uganda. [from abstract]

This study in Uganda aimed to untangle the intrinsic motivation, retention, and performance factors for health workers faith-based facilities compared to public sector health workers. [adapted from publisher]

This paper demonstrates the use of the workload indicator of staffing needs methodology in determining staffing requirements for the nursing staff in a hospital setting. It shows how the results can be used to assess overstaffing and understaffing as well as determine the work pressure among the different categories of nurses thus providing a basis for effective nurse redistribution to exploit efficiency gains without compromising the quality of services. [from abstract]

This study examines the issues, in the Ugandan context, with strategies to shift facility and community-based tasks to “expert patients,” clients who are recruited and trained to provide suport services for other clients in facilities and in communities. [adapted from summary]

This report is based on the accounts of 90 Ugandan health workers at the front line. The research explored with them the rewards and the challenges, explanations for perceived poor practices and promising solutions. The interim findings focus on the rewards of being a health worker and how low pay affects them. [from introduction]

This article outlines a project and its evaluation that used ICT equipment to increase the uptake of continuing professional development training in Uganda. [adapted from abstract]

This article explored the lessons learned by health workers involved in the provision of prevention of mother-to-child transmission services in eastern Uganda to better understand what more needs to be done to strengthen the program. [adapted from abstract]

Traditional healers shoulder a large burden of care of patients with mental health problems. The purpose of this study was to describe the profiles and outcome of traditional healing practices for severe mental illnesses in Jinja and Iganga districts in the Busoga region of Eastern Uganda. [adapted from author]

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the reliability, validity and usefulness of the Performance of Routine Information System Management (PRISM) framework and its associated data collection and analysis tools designed to assess, design, strengthen and evaluate routine health information systems. [adapted from abstract]

The Ministry of Health, in partnership with CapacityPlus, conducted a discrete choice experiment survey among current students in health training programs as well as health workers practicing in rural districts to investigate preferences for potential attraction and retention strategies. The results constitute an important input to the policy-making process related to the identification, costing, and selection of possible retention interventions for implementation. [from publisher]

This study details the perceived benefits, problems, and risks of abuse of per diems and allowances in developing countries. Drawing on 41 interviews with government and nongovernmental officials in Malawi and Uganda the report highlights how practices to maximize per diems have become a defining characteristic of many public institutions and influence how employees carry out their work. As per diems have become de facto top ups of salaries, more fundamental reform of health worker incentives and payment is also needed. [from abstract]

There is increasing global emphasis on mentorship of young scientists in order to train and develop the next leaders in global health. However, mentoring efforts are challenged by the high clinical, research and administrative demands. This study evaluated the status and nature of mentoring practices at Makerere College of Health Sciences. [from abstract]

The authors conducted a cluster randomized trial to assess the effect of community-based peer health workers on AIDS care of adults in Rakai, Uganda. [from abstract]

The principles and practices outlined in this document are based on the author’s experience with creating a health worker clinical mentorship program for pediatric HIV care in Uganda as part of the continuum of education required to create competent health-care providers. [adapted from author]

As part of the collaborative to improve the efficiency of HIV service delivery, the authors conducted a baseline assessment of HIV/AIDS provider productivity, efficiency, and engagement in Uganda. [adapted from author]

This paper presents a randomized feld experiment on community-based monitoring of public primary health care providers in Uganda. Through two rounds of village meetings, localized NGOs encouraged communities to be more involved with the state of health service provision and strengthened their capacity to hold their local health providers to account for performance. A year after the intervention, treatment communities are more involved in monitoring the provider; health workers appear to exert higher effort to serve the community; and there was a positive impact on child health.

The focus of this brief is on examining how the lack of availability of trained personnel can constrain the ability of the government of Uganda to meet its strategic goals in scaling up antiretroviral treatment (ART). It utilizes a capacity module tool that estimates human resource requirements for HIV interventions. [from author]

This article describes an innovative 2-year apprenticeship training program implemented by Makerere University School of Public Health to strengthen capacity for leadership and management of HIV/AIDS programs in Uganda. [from abstract]

The objective of this study was to make a comprehensive assessment of community-based education (CBE) as implemented by Ugandan health professional training institutions to document the nature of CBE conducted and propose an ideal model with minimum requirements for health professional training institutions in Uganda. [adapted from abstract]

This article describes Uganda’s transition from a paper filing system to an electronic HRIS capable of providing information about country-specific health workforce questions. It examines the ongoing five-step HRIS strengthening process used to implement an HRIS that tracks health worker data at the Uganda Nurses and Midwives Council (UNMC) and describes how HRIS data can be used to address workforce planning questions. [adapted from abstract]

Several training institutions have engaged in programs to expose pre-service health workers to rural health work to demystify it and to enable the professionals make an informed choice on practice location after qualification. In this study, the intentions of Ugandan medical students to work in rural health facilities after qualification were sounded out, together with the factors that affect them and their perception of rural areas. [from abstract]

In Uganda, the Faculty of Health Sciences of Uganda Martyrs University picked up the challenge of training health workers in the field of health promotion. Over 100 health workers have qualified in health promotion since 2004. This study followed up the graduates of the program to see what they are doing in the field, to see how their current work is related to health promotion, to see how they perceive their work and to identify the challenges they face in executing health promotion duties. [from abstract]

This article examined the association between density of healthcare providers and patient outcomes using a large nationally representative cohort of patients receiving combination antiretroviral therapy in Uganda. [from abstract]

This paper aims to explore the current key issues facing Uganda’s health human resource climate with particular attention to practice environments including recruitment, retention and productivity of its health workforce, to identify the HR solutions that are being or have been employed to address these main challenges. The paper will also help in identifying knowledge gaps for future in-depth research and recommendations for future strategies. [from introduction]