Study

Study of Attrition, Availability, and Retention of Midwife Service Scheme Officers in Nigeria

The Midwives Service Scheme, established in 2009 to reduce Nigeria’s high maternal mortality rate, supplies midwives to rural and remote areas where they are most needed. CapacityPlus collaborated with the National Primary Health Care Development Agency to study factors underpinning attrition, availability, and retention of personnel and propose measures for motivating and retaining rural-based midwives. Presented at the Third Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Cape Town, South Africa, on October 1, 2014, this poster presents findings from the study.

Human Resources Information Systems (HRIS): A Review across States of India

India faces critical human resources shortages for key cadres such as doctors, specialists, nurses, and midwives. Other key challenges include suboptimal deployment of staff exacerbated by a skewed urban-rural distribution, gaps in certain specialties, and inefficient use of staff due to poor rationalization of tasks. Lack of comprehensive, reliable, and up-to-date data and an absence of commonly agreed definitions and analytical tools make the task of managing the health workforce more difficult. This study reviewed human resources information systems (HRIS) across all 28 states and 7 union territories to assess their purpose, scope, coverage, software technology, usability, and sustainability. The study points out the need for a national HRIS framework to move all states to a web-based platform with common technologies and data structures.

Exploring Contraceptive Use Differentials in Sub-Saharan Africa through a Health Workforce Lens

Globally, 56% of all married women are using a modern method of contraception, up from less than 10% in 1960. In sub-Saharan Africa, however, only 19% of married women are using a modern method of contraception. Since nearly all family planning services require assistance from a health worker, access to health workers is a principal supply-side determinant of family planning service use. This technical brief presents findings from a study that explored if and how health workforce measures differ between eastern and western Africa, in an effort to identify factors that may have helped some countries to achieve important gains in contraceptive prevalence while other countries have not. The findings raise questions about whether government commitment and certain policy choices vis-à-vis health workforce distribution and qualifications—even when absolute levels of health worker density are low—could make a difference in the provision of family planning services in resource-constrained countries.

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