Uganda

This post originally appeared on the Frontline Health Workers Coalition blog.

“What inspires me is when I see patients critically ill and then recovering, laughing, smiling—I feel great,” says Agnes Masagwayi, a senior clinical health officer in Mbale District, Uganda. “I love my job with all my heart.”

But her health facility, she admits, was in “a bad state.” Running water was sporadic. Essential drugs ran out. Space for maternity care was so limited that many women delivered babies on the floor. Infection control was poor. And there weren’t nearly enough health workers to meet the demand. Read more »

This post was originally published on the Global Health Workforce Alliance Members’ Platform. CapacityPlus is the featured member in March. We encourage you to join and contribute to the discussion.

In recent years, heightened attention has been given to scaling up the production of health workers in response to the global human resources for health (HRH) crisis. While many countries face absolute health worker shortages and need to increase their availability, the HRH crisis is not just a supply problem. CapacityPlus provides technical assistance to ensure that health workers are more equitably distributed—especially to rural and other underserved areas, remain working at their posts, and effectively provide health care services in order to increase access to quality family planning, reproductive health, HIV and AIDS, and other primary health services and help countries move toward universal health coverage. Read more »

This post was originally published on VITAL, the blog of IntraHealth International.

The global agenda is clear: universal health coverage. And as we heard at the Third Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, a strong, qualified health workforce is essential to achieving this goal.

But how do we create a strong global health workforce that can provide care to all seven billion of us? One of the keys is information—reliable, accurate information on health workers’ skills and qualifications.

Data on individual health workers’ training can be hard to come by. The information is often scattered in paper files, buried in obscure databases, or simply does not exist. To help address this challenge, IntraHealth’s iHRIS team in Uganda customized the open source iHRIS software to create iHRIS Train, a whole new application that captures and reports health worker training data. Read more »

Constance Newman, senior team lead for gender equality and health at IntraHealth International and for CapacityPlus, presents the following case from Uganda. It demonstrates how IntraHealth’s Uganda Capacity Program is assisting the Uganda Ministry of Health to apply gender research results to improve leadership, governance, and management of the health workforce.

Human resources management policies and practices that promote nonviolence, nondiscrimination, equal opportunity, and gender equality at work result in positive professional work environments and more efficient recruitment, deployment, and retention of human resources for health. However, the gender dimensions of Uganda’s health workforce were largely unexplored. Because of this, the Uganda Capacity Program provided technical support to a Ministry of Health Gender Discrimination and Inequality Analysis (GDIA) to inform gender mainstreaming in the public health sector of Uganda, and in particular, to promote gender equality in workforce policy, planning, development, and human resources management. This supported Uganda’s Gender Policy mandate of “promoting and carrying out gender-oriented research in order to identify gender inequalities¹.”  Read more »