Journal Articles

The HIV status of surgeons is a contentious matter in the context of the informed consent obtained from patients. This article presents the results of a survey of the views of practicing surgeons in South Africa regarding aspects of HIV and its impact on surgeons. [adapted from introduction]

This article details the results of a survey and environmental scan regarding educational opportunities available to future health care providers concerning the topic of intimate partner violence against women. [adapted from abstract]

Nepal’s Safe Delivery Incentive Programme (SDIP) was introduced nationwide in 2005 with the intention of increasing utilisation of professional care at childbirth. It provided cash to women giving birth in a health facility and an incentive to the health provider for each delivery attended, either at home or in the facility. We explored early implementation of the programme at the district-level to understand the factors that have contributed to its low uptake. [from abstract]

Standardizing the experiences of medical students in a community preceptorship where clinical sites vary by geography and discipline can be challenging. Computer-assisted learning is prevalent in medical education and can help standardize experiences, but often is not used to its fullest advantage. A blended learning curriculum combining web-based modules with face-to-face learning can ensure students obtain core curricular principles. [from abstract]

This case outlines how Oman is continuing to turn around its excessive dependence on expatriate workforce through strategic workforce development planning. [from abstract]

Given that IT projects may take a long time to be fully institutionalized, sufficient resources are required to build the local capacity to support and sustain the project after the withdrawal of donors. Inadequate donor support often contributes to weakening rather than strengthening human resource capacity and effective system design, since it emphasizes the technology itself at the expense of the needs of the users. These factors contribute to the design and implemntation of unsustainable health information systems in developing countries. [from abstract]

District health systems in Africa depend largely on public funding. In many countries, not only are these funds insufficient, but they are also released in an untimely fashion, thereby creating serious cash flow problems for district health managers. This paper examines how the untimely release of public sector health funds in Ghana affects district health activities and the way district managers cope with the situation. [from abstract]

Taking advantage of societal trends involving the “third sector”, a social model of philanthropy and the open-source software and educational resource movements, provides the opportunity for online education for capacity building at low cost. The Peoples Open Access Education Initiative, Peoples-uni, aims to help build public health capacity in this way, and this paper describes its evolution. [from abstract]

This paper aims to discuss the challenges influencing the state of caregiving in the Kanye community home-based care programme in Botswana. [from abstract]

Because of their knowledge of medicines and clinical therapeutics, pharmacists are suitably placed for task shifting in health care and could be further trained to undertake functions such as clinical management and laboratory diagnostics. Indeed, pharmacists have been shown to be willing, competent, and cost-effective providers of what the professional literature calls pharmaceutical care interventions; however, internationally, there is an underuse of pharmacists for patient care and public health efforts. [from abstract]

The Zambia Prevention, Care and Treatment Partnership began training and placing community volunteers as lay counsellors in order to complement the efforts of the health care workers in providing HIV counselling and testing services. These volunteers are trained using the standard national counselling and testing curriculum. This study was conducted to review the effectiveness of lay counsellors in addressing staff shortages and the provision of HIV counselling and testing services. [from abstract]

The potential for traditional birth attendants (TBAs) to improve neonatal health outcomes has largely been overlooked during the current debate regarding the role of TBAs in improving maternal health. Randomly selected TBAs were interviewed to gain a more thorough understanding of their knowledge, attitudes, and practices regarding maternal and newborn care. [from abstract]

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]

This study examined the attitude of health care workers to nurses, doctors and patients infected with HIV. [from abstract]

Prevention of mother-to-child transmission has been considered as not a simple intervention but a comprehensive set of interventions requiring capable health workers. Viet Nam’s extensive health care system reaches the village level, but still HIV-infected mothers and children have received inadequate health care services for prevention of mother-to-child transmission. We report here the health workers’ perceptions on factors that lead to their failure to give good quality prevention of mother-to-child transmission services. [from abstract]

The purpose of this paper is to present a complex yet transparent, computable model to simulate the regulation of the flow of personnel through a multiple-exit eye care training scheme linked to the health workforce. The proposed training system is based on the notion that all practitioners within eye care be trained with a selection of topics from a common set of competences. In theory this would allow any practitioner to increase his or her range of competences by both acquiring new ones and by lifting the standard of those already attained.

We wanted to try to account for worker motivation as a key factor that might affect the success of an intervention to improve implementation of health worker practices in eight district hospitals in Kenya. In the absence of available tools, we therefore aimed to develop a tool that could enable a rapid measurement of motivation at baseline and at subsequent points during the 18-month intervention study. [from abstract]

The last two decades has seen an explosion of institutions involved in the training of health personnel. This is possibly because of the huge demand of human resources of health (HRH) not only in Nepal, but worldwide. Various grades of HRH are going out of the country and seeking their livelihood elsewhere. [from abstract]

There is a serious shortage of health professionals in rural and remote areas in Australia and world wide. The purpose of this article was to add to existing information about allied health students, particularly occupational therapy students, and rural and remote practice by reviewing the literature on occupational therapy students’ perceptions of rural and remote practice. A variety of influencing factors were identified, as were the main characteristics of rural practice in relation to the future employment of students. [abstract]

Regional Australia is critically short of registered nurses (RNs) due to an ageing nursing workforce and difficulty in attracting new staff. It is recognised that rural background is the most influential factor shaping a health professional’s decision to practise in regional areas. Because of this, Charles Sturt University offered a bachelor of nursing by distance education (DE), enabling rural and remote enrolled nurses (ENs)to upgrade their qualifications to RN. However, despite the flexible study mode offered, many rural and remote ENs were reluctant to progress to university study.

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]

This article discusses the agenda for monitoring and improving the quality of health care through the use of clinical governance in National Health Service organizations in the UK. [adapted from introduction]

Voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) is a cornerstone for successful implementation of prevention, care and support services among HIV negative and positive individuals. VCT is also perceived to be an effective strategy in risk reduction among sexually active young people. This study aimed to assess the acceptability of VCT and its actual uptake among young health care professional students. [adapted from abstract]

This paper evaluates the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of alternative training strategies for increasing access to emergency obstetric care in Burkina Faso. [adapted from abstract]

An estimated four million deaths occur annually among children in the neonatal period. Current evidence-based interventions could prevent a large proportion of these deaths; however, neonatal health care workers need to have knowledge regarding such practices before being able to put them into action. This survey assesses the knowledge of primary health care practitioners regarding basic, evidence-based procedures in neonatal care in a Vietnamese province and investigates whether differences in level of knowledge were linked to certain characteristics of community health centers.

The provision of eye care in the developing world has been constrained by the limited number of trained personnel and by professional cultures. This paper presents a highly flexible competencies-based multiple entry and exit training system that matches and adapts training to the prevailing population and service needs and demands, while lifting overall standards over time and highlighting the areas of potential benefit. [from abstract]

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]

With the scarcity of African health professionals, volunteers are earmarked for an increased role in HIV/AIDS management, with a growing number of projects relying on grassroots community members to provide home nursing care to those with AIDS - as part of the wider task-shifting agenda. Yet little is known about how best to facilitate such involvement. This paper reports on community perceptions of a 3-year project which sought to train and support volunteer health workers in a rural community in South Africa. [from abstract]

This study highlights the experiences and challenges associated with decentralisation and the partial re-centralisation in relation to the recruitment and distribution of health workers. [from abstract]

The availability and distribution of an appropriate eye care workforce are fundamental to reaching the goals of “VISION 2020: The right to sight”, the global initiative for the elimination of avoidable blindness. The objectives of the study were to determine the availability and distribution of human resources for eye care delivery in Enugu Urban, south-eastern Nigeria. [from abstract]