Global Leadership

CapacityPlus played a leadership role in HRH advocacy, knowledge sharing, and strategy development through its strong collaborations with global alliances and multilateral, regional, and national organizations to advance the expansion and use of the HRH evidence base for decision-making and progress, and through its own knowledge management and communications platforms.

Driving and Supporting Global Momentum on HRH
With the Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA)—a partnership of national governments, civil society, international agencies, financing institutions, and others united to address the health workforce crisis—CapacityPlus contributed significantly to the design and implementation of the Second Global Forum on HRH (January 25–29, 2011, Bangkok, Thailand) and served on the organizing committee of the Third Global Forum on HRH (November 9–14, 2013, Recife, Brazil). With lead partner IntraHealth, the project guided development and implementation of one of the Third Forum’s themes, Empowerment and Incentives: Harnessing Health Workers’ Voice, Rights, and Responsibilities in Moving toward Universal Health Coverage. The forum resulted in 57 new country commitments for HRH intended to accelerate progress toward universal health coverage. CapacityPlus also worked with GHWA as core members of six out of eight working groups developing a post-2015 global HRH strategy.

Contributing to Global Coalitions and Technical Working Groups
The project contributed leadership and technical expertise to over a dozen global coalitions, working groups, and partnerships advocating and developing frameworks, guidance, and tools to support countries to strengthen key components of HRH systems. CapacityPlus’s technical input into these global efforts synergized with and informed the project’s collaborations with country stakeholders to test and refine approaches in areas such as retention, preservice education, and health workforce information systems. Accomplishments included:

• Launch and growth of global coalitions supporting professionalization and strengthening of the social service and supply chain workforces: the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance and People that Deliver.

• Launch of the World Health Organization (WHO)’s global policy recommendations on health worker retention in rural and remote areas, which contributed to CapacityPlus’s development of the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit and (with WHO) iHRIS Retain software for costing packages of retention interventions.

• Completion of the WHO’s recommendations for optimizing health worker roles to improve access to key maternal and newborn health interventions through task shifting, with implications for improved birth spacing and FP integration with other health services. CapacityPlus’s role included technical inputs, contributing to the working group’s dissemination strategy for the recommendations, and coalition-building to encourage country implementation.

• Significant technical and financial contributions to the WHO guidance document on transforming and scaling up health professionals’ education and training, and revision of the international standards for basic medical education.

• Finalization of the USAID-led in-service training framework and guidelines.

• Publication by the WHO, in collaboration with the World Bank, of How to Conduct a Discrete Choice Experiment for Health Workforce Recruitment and Retention in Remote and Rural Areas: A User Guide.

• Field-testing of the WHO country assessment tool on the sources and use of HRH data by the Health Workforce Information Reference Group (HIRG), enabling countries to better make evidence-based decisions in their efforts to strengthen the health workforce.

• Development of an eHealth strategy and regional heath information systems policy for the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), including core eHealth indicators.