Productivity

The health workforce is critical for ensuring access to high-quality family planning/reproductive health, maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, and other services in order to improve health outcomes. While increasing the number of health workers where there are shortages is essential, it is equally important to improve the productivity of the existing workforce and make service delivery more efficient. The Health Workforce Productivity Analysis and Improvement Toolkit describes a step-wise process to measure the productivity of facility-based health workers, understand the underlying causes of productivity problems, and identify potential interventions to address them. Users can enter and save facility-level data on service delivery outputs and human resources costs in order to calculate total health workforce productivity and compare these rates across facilities. This process differentiates higher-productivity facilities from lower-productivity ones, which through a qualitative assessment can help managers and supervisors to consider which factors are affecting health workforce productivity in the facilities.

Improving Efficiency, Productivity, and Performance with the Workforce You Have, Not the One You Wish You Had

This presentation was given at the CapacityPlus knowledge-sharing and dissemination event, Supporting Country-Led Efforts to Recruit and Retain Health Workers and Improve Their Productivity, held on February 18, 2014, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

CapacityPlus, with the USAID ASSIST Project and the World Bank, cohosted a knowledge-sharing and dissemination event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on February 18. The three-hour program focused on the latest evidence from country applications of innovations to strengthen health workforce recruitment, retention, and productivity. Through a combination of panel presentations, interactive roundtable groups, and moderated question-and-answer sessions, participants learned about and discussed various approaches and tools that can be used to develop policies to strengthen recruitment, retention, and productivity and improve access to high-quality family planning, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and other health services. Read the related news and access videos and presentations: Read more »