CapacityPlus

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CapacityPlus is a global project funded by the United States Agency for International Development and led by IntraHealth International. Focused on strengthening the health workforce needed to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, the project assists countries to improve accessibility and quality of health services by addressing deficits in human resources for health (HRH).

Contents

The specific goals of the project are to:

Background

CapacityPlus started in 2009 and works to address many of the human resources for health (HRH) issues. In 2006 the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a global shortage of over four million health workers and identified 57 countries as having a health workforce crisis. [1] A 2013 report issued by the Global Health Workforce Alliance and the World Health Organization found that 83 countries fall below a threshold of 22.8 skilled health professionals per 10,000 population. [2]

The constraint issues surrounding HRH include:

CapacityPlus works in Botswana, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Laos, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The project has completed activities in Haiti, Kenya, Mozambique, Peru, and Zimbabwe.

Activities

Health Workforce Development

Capacity Plus’s Bottlenecks and Best Buys approach has been used in over 50 health professional schools in eight countries. The approach enables schools to identify critical bottlenecks to providing quality pre-service education for health workers and prioritize affordable actions for increasing the quantity of graduates while maintaining or improving the quality of education. [3] To help health professional schools improve their management, CapacityPlus co-developed with schools a series of management tools as well as the Dean’s Dashboard, free open source school management software. CapacityPlus also partnered with the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank, and the Global Health Workforce Alliance in an exploration of innovative solutions for the financing of education to increase the number of health workers available to provide care to growing populations. [4] CapacityPlus is a partner with the Medical Education Partnership Initiative (MEPI) to improve graduate tracking, community-based education, and distance learning in African medical schools, as well as a partner with the Nursing Education Partnership Initiative (NEPI) to conduct capacity assessments and costing analyses of African nursing and midwifery schools.

Rural Health Workforce Retention

The World Health Organization issued 16 global recommendations for improving the recruitment and retention of health workers in rural areas—a challenge faced by most countries and a barrier to universal health coverage. In Laos, the Ministry of Health partnered with CapacityPlus and the WHO to apply the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit (developed by CapacityPlus using the WHO recommendations) and iHRIS Retain costing software to assess which of the recommendations would be most effective in the Laotian context and subsequently inform a new national policy for recruiting and retaining health workers. [5] [6] [7] Similar work in Uganda led to the development of a new retention package for public-sector health workers.

Human Resources Management

With input from applications in Ghana, Nigeria, and several other countries, CapacityPlus refined its Human Resources Management (HRM) Assessment Approach to guide policy-makers, managers, and HR practitioners toward better understanding and responding to HRM challenges facing their health systems. [8] The approach promotes the collection and analysis of information on defined HRM challenges, and informs development of effective policy, strategy, systems, and process interventions in response. Working with the Dominican Republic to compare health worker payrolls with facility staffing, CapacityPlus helped identify over 10,000 ghost workers and helped the government save $7 million per year in lost wages that are now being reinvested in the Dominican health system to increase health worker wages and eliminate service fees.

Human Resources Information Systems

CapacityPlus supports the iHRIS platform, free, open source software that assists countries to maintain accurate information on their health workforce and to use that information to make decisions and develop policies that strengthen HRH systems. [9] Because it is built on a flexible framework and distributed under an open source license, iHRIS can be customized and extended to address local needs. [10] Currently, almost 20 countries are using the iHRIS software applications in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and other languages. Worldwide, more than 800,000 health worker records are captured in iHRIS, making it the most widely used open source HRIS software. In Ghana, for example, CapacityPlus is helping the Ministry of Health move its system from paper to computer, enabling the ministry to better manage its 98,000 employees. [11] Because the iHRIS software is free, governments have saved almost $150 million in proprietary software fees. [12]

HRH Global Resource Center

CapacityPlus hosts the HRH Global Resource Center (GRC) (launched in 2006 by the previous Capacity Project), a digital library and eLearning platform committed to reducing access barriers in developing countries to the best human resources for health information available. [13] With over 4,000 resources and an average of 60,000 monthly users from 172 countries, the GRC provides the largest collection of open access HRH resources and user base of the existing HRH digital libraries and knowledge hubs.

Partners

CapacityPlus is led by IntraHealth International with partners:

The project also has four regional associate partners:

Related Research Articles

Human resources (HR) is the set of people who make up the workforce of an organization, business sector, industry, or economy. A narrower concept is human capital, the knowledge and skills which the individuals command. Similar terms include manpower, labor, or personnel.

Staffing is the process of finding the right worker with appropriate qualifications or experience and recruiting them to fill a job position or role. Through this process, organizations acquire, deploy, and retain a workforce of sufficient quantity and quality to create positive impacts on the organization's effectiveness. In management, staffing is an operation of recruiting the employees by evaluating their skills and knowledge before offering them specific job roles accordingly.

Knowledge workers are workers whose main capital is knowledge. Examples include ICT Professionals, physicians, pharmacists, architects, engineers, scientists, design thinkers, public accountants, lawyers, editors, and academics, whose job is to "think for a living".

Human resource management is the strategic and coherent approach to the effective and efficient management of people in a company or organization such that they help their business gain a competitive advantage. It is designed to maximize employee performance in service of an employer's strategic objectives. Human resource management is primarily concerned with the management of people within organizations, focusing on policies and systems. HR departments are responsible for overseeing employee-benefits design, employee recruitment, training and development, performance appraisal, and reward management, such as managing pay and employee benefits systems. HR also concerns itself with organizational change and industrial relations, or the balancing of organizational practices with requirements arising from collective bargaining and governmental laws.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Health human resources</span> People acting to improve health outcomes

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Workforce management (WFM) is an institutional process that maximizes performance levels and competency for an organization. The process includes all the activities needed to maintain a productive workforce, such as field service management, human resource management, performance and training management, data collection, recruiting, budgeting, forecasting, scheduling and analytics.

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E-HRM is the planning, implementation and application of information technology for both networking and supporting at least two individual or collective actors in their shared performing of HR activities.

A human resource for health information system (HRHIS), also known as human resource information system (HRIS) — is a system for collecting, processing, managing and disseminating data and information on human resource for health (HRH). Depending on the level of development of a country's health care system and the organization of its workforce, an HRHIS can be computerized or paper-based, including information on numbers and distribution of health workers and track their career information. It is usually an integral part of a comprehensive health management information system, and may be used to monitor and assess the performance of the overall health system.

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Human resource information systems (HRIS) are software designed to help businesses meet core HR needs and improve the productivity of management and employees. HRIS is used to manage human resources in a more structured way. Human resource management needs timely and reliable information on the present and potential workforce in order to acquire a competitive advantage in the marketplace. HRIS and technological innovation have made it much easier to meet this information demand. HRIS is also hardware, support functions, policies, and systematic procedures that support the strategic and operational processes of HR departments into automated processes. It involves databases and computer programs that are utilized in HRIS implementation to store, manages, record, deliver, and manipulate data for a variety of human resource operations.

References

  1. World Health Organization. The world health report 2006: working together for health, Geneva, 2006
  2. Global Health Workforce Alliance and World Health Organization. A Universal Truth: No Health Without a Workforce.
  3. Tulenko K, Bailey R, Seifman R. "Scaling Up Health Worker Production: The Bottlenecks and Best Buys Approach." CapacityPlus technical brief no. 9
  4. Tulenko K, Preker A. "Innovative Financing Options for the Preservice Education of Health Workers." CapacityPlus technical brief no. 8
  5. Jaskiewicz W, Deussom R, Wurts L, Mgomella G. Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit: Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Health Workers. December 2012
  6. iHRIS Retain, Cost Health Worker Retention Interventions
  7. Buchan J et al. "Early implementation of WHO recommendations for the retention of health workers in remote and rural areas." Bulletin of the World Health Organization 2013;91:834-840
  8. Marsden P, Caffrey M, McCaffery J. Human Resources Management Assessment Approach. January 2013
  9. iHRIS: Open Source Health Workforce Information Solutions
  10. Peter Groen. "Latest news on the 'open source' Integrated Human Resource Information System (iHRIS)" Open Health News August 26, 2013
  11. David J. Olson. "Years of Investments Finally Put Health Workers on the Global Stage." The Huffington Post September 23, 2013
  12. "Nineteen Countries Save $149 Million with Open Source Health Workforce Information Systems." CapacityPlus News March 6, 2014
  13. Farrell CM, Rhodes R. “Measuring the Success of the HRH Global Resource Center.” Knowledge Management for Development 2012;8:1