Uganda

“I Made Some Changes”: A Nurse/Midwife’s Experience with Leadership and Management Training

Sarah Dwyer — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 15:41:53 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Maternal Health Task Force blog as part of the “Supporting the Human in Human Resources” blog series cohosted by the Maternal Health Task Force and Jacaranda Health.

“Things were really a bit appalling.”

That’s what conditions at her rural health center felt like to Habiba Shaban Agong, a senior nursing officer and midwife in Uganda.

She says she loves her profession. “In midwifery I do a lot,” she adds proudly. “I help mothers in carrying out their pregnancies. During deliveries I help them to conduct live babies—to make a better future.” But it pained her that her facility wasn’t able to deliver the high quality of services the community deserved.

For starters, there weren’t nearly enough health workers to meet the demand. Each department had only “about one human resource working day and night,” Habiba says. “They get exhausted, and that can hinder service delivery.”

Author's name:

Sarah Dwyer

Publication Date:

July 2014

Empowered Health Workers Improve Health Care, One Facility at a Time

Carol Bales — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 19:01:30 +0000

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.

Author's name:

Sarah Dwyer

Publication Date:

April 2014

Open Source Health Workforce Information Systems

Sarah Dwyer — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 19:23:01 +0000

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.

The World Health Organization recognizes a key component to achieving universal health coverage is “a sufficient capacity of well-trained, motivated health workers.” For many countries, successfully managing the distribution of their health workforce is reliant upon a human resources information system (HRIS). The better systems are developed with a user-centered approach and focus on data use. Good HRIS turn data into information that can inform the decision-making process.

Author's name:

Dykki Settle, Michael Drane, and Dave Potenziani

Publication Date:

March 2014

Supporting Country-Led Efforts to Recruit and Retain Health Workers and Improve Their Productivity

Sarah Dwyer — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 20:30:08 +0000

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.

Author's name:

Wanda Jaskiewicz

Publication Date:

March 2014

How I Fell in Love with the Sisters and Students at St. Joseph’s

Carol Bales — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 04:34:58 +0000

Last month, I met the Little Sisters of St. Francis and many of their students at St. Joseph’s Kamuli School of Midwifery in the rural Kamuli District of Uganda. This convent, hospital, and school is now celebrating 100 years of service.

CapacityPlus is helping the school achieve a decades-long goal: to provide a high-quality education leading to a diploma in midwifery to young women from the region.

Author's name:

Heather Ross

Publication Date:

February 2014

New Software Application Tracks Health Workforce Training

Carol Bales — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:37:57 +0000

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.

Author's name:

Amanda Puckett

Publication Date:

January 2014

Empowering Health Workers to Improve Service Delivery in Uganda

Carol Bales — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 13:55:11 +0000

This post was originally published on USAID’s IMPACT blog.

Agnes Masagwayi has a fierce determination to give her community the best possible care. But as a clinical health officer in Mbale District, Uganda, she knows how difficult it can be.

Author's name:

Sarah Dwyer and Carol Bales

Publication Date:

December 2013

Addressing Gender Inequality in Uganda’s Health Workforce

Carol Bales — Wed, 13 Nov 2013 19:44:19 +0000

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.”

Author's name:

Constance Newman

Publication Date:

November 2013

Two Projects Working Together to Strengthen the Health Workforce in Uganda

Carol Bales — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 16:47:38 +0000

How can a global project and a country-specific project work together to strengthen the health workforce and increase access to quality care? What about in Uganda, where there are only 14 doctors, nurses, and midwives for every 10,000 people?

The CapacityPlus global project and the Uganda Capacity Program are both funded by USAID and led by IntraHealth International. CapacityPlus has worked in over 20 countries to address the health workforce shortage, and offers tools that can be adapted for any country. The Uganda Capacity Program builds the capacity of local Ugandan institutions—like ministries, professional health councils, and universities—to plan for, develop, and strengthen the management of health workers.

Author's name:

Carol Bales

Publication Date:

November 2013

Health Workers: Key to Family Planning and Reproductive Health

Carol Bales — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 16:45:41 +0000

“To talk about sexual and reproductive health, and not to talk about human resources for health—then the equation is not complete,” says Patrick Mugirwa, a program officer with Partners in Population and Development (PPD) Africa Regional Office. “So for PPD to have meaningful advocacy for sexual and reproductive health, of necessity human resources for health must be one of the major components we must advocate for.”

A CapacityPlus associate partner, PPD is an intergovernmental alliance that promotes South-South cooperation toward attainment of the global population and reproductive health agenda for sustainable development.

Author's name:

Sarah Dwyer

Publication Date:

October 2013

Using Data to Successfully Advocate for Health Workforce Funding

Carol Bales — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 15:47:47 +0000

In Mbale District, Uganda, one exhausted midwife—widely loved by her community and usually fantastic at her job—found herself snapping at her clients and being rude. For days, she’d been working without rest at a clinic that offers 24-hour maternity care. And she was burned out.

She’s not alone. The country’s vast shortage of health workers has left almost half the jobs in the health sector empty and the other half filled with staff who are overworked to the breaking point. In Mbale, clinicians could give patients only about five minutes of their time, which led to far too many mistaken diagnoses and prescriptions.

Author's name:

Margarite Nathe

Publication Date:

October 2013

Kenya and Uganda Model Mentorship for Health Workforce Information Systems

Carol Bales — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 20:44:27 +0000

Can a mentoring relationship between nations expedite implementation of the iHRIS open source software for tracking and managing health workers?

With that in mind, Robert Nguni of Capacity Kenya recently traveled to neighboring Uganda for a week-long visit to learn about strategies successfully put into practice by the Uganda Capacity Program.

Author's name:

Adam Gori, guest blogger

Publication Date:

October 2013

Strengthening Health Workforce Data for Improved Health Service Delivery

Carol Bales — Mon, 14 Oct 2013 13:33:35 +0000

To improve health services, Uganda is focusing on the people that provide quality care. In our new video, Ugandan health workers, managers, and leaders show how the country’s efforts are paying off—and how service delivery has improved. The following story highlights one aspect of this work.

“My office is like a web. All information about human resources is needed in my office,” explains Ojulun Joreme. He’s the principal personnel officer for Dokolo District in Uganda. “Left and right I have to keep giving out information about each individual.”

Author's name:

Carol Bales

Publication Date:

October 2013

Motivated to Do More

Sarah Dwyer — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 17:33:17 +0000

Monica Watuvamu is already serving her community as a nurse and midwife at Kamuli Mission Hospital in Uganda. But she wants to do more.

“I’ve been actually going back to school,” she says, “to upgrade and improve my knowledge and skills.” The hospital is contributing to the costs, which is a big help. “I’ve been motivated, and I’m still motivated to help patients so that they get better.”

Working in the ultrasound unit, Monica recently discovered that a woman had a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, which she knew to be an extremely dangerous and life-threatening condition. Monica moved quickly to get the woman into surgery, and a disaster was averted. “The following day,” she recalls, “all these people [at the hospital] were really happy that I managed to find it out and that the patient was helped.”

Author's name:

Sarah Dwyer with Rebecca Rhodes

Publication Date:

October 2013

Improving Health Workforce Leadership and Management

Sarah Dwyer — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 17:11:13 +0000

To improve health services, Uganda is focusing on the people that provide quality care. In our new video, Ugandan health workers, managers, and leaders show how the country’s efforts are paying off—and how service delivery has improved. The following story highlights one aspect of this work.

Dr. John Baptist Waniaye was working as a medical officer when he realized he wanted to take on a new role. “I opted to go into management for health [because] I realized that there are gaps which when you’re a leader and a manager you can easily fix and make the environment very good for the health workers. And that is my drive—I want to see that health workers have what they need in order to offer their services and that our patients are happy.”

Author's name:

Sarah Dwyer

Publication Date:

October 2013