Pape Gaye, IntraHealth’s president and CEO, discussed the challenges of building sub-Saharan Africa’s capacity in health care and information communication technology (ICT) at the Public Health Informatics conference in Seattle, Washington, on September 19. Gaye spoke as part of the plenary session “Decision Support for Public Health and Policy Development: Building Capacity and Sustainability.”
Gaye explained how IntraHealth’s Human Resources Information System (HRIS) development follows a systems strengthening approach. Gaye highlighted IntraHealth’s role in creating the Capacity Project’s Human Resources for Health Global Resource Center as well as the organization’s growing leadership in Health Workforce Informatics. Gaye suggested several areas for future development, including:
Gaye concluded with the following points:
One of the important decisions we had to make when designing our iHRIS Plan workforce modeling software was which HRH projection model to use as the foundation for the software. We even held a workshop with workforce planning experts from all over the world to discuss this critical issue.
The purpose of workforce planning is to determine the most appropriate balance among the mix, distribution and number of health workers. A new technical brief by HRIS strengthening team member Dr. Pamela McQuide provides a review of different workforce planning approaches and models used to project the workforce. We think this brief is essential reading before getting started with a program like iHRIS Plan.
This brief discusses six different HRH projection approaches, based on a review of the current literature. Although the main unit of analysis in these approaches is the number of health care providers, the method chosen to estimate human resources requirements reflects the political and economic choices and social values of a health system. A list of references serves as a guide for those who would like more information on this subject.
The Capacity Project’s invaluable library of human resources for health information, the HRH Global Resource Center, provides even more resources on workforce planning. These include the publications Health Human Resources Planning from the International Centre for Human Resources in Nursing; Forecasting the Global Shortage of Physicians: An Economic- and Needs-Based Approach; and Monitoring the Health Workforce: Measurement Issues and Tools.
Dykki Settle, the Capacity Project’s Informatics Director, and Barbara Stillwell, the Project’s HR Policy and Planning Advisor, published an article in the September 10-16 issue of Nursing Standard, a British nursing journal. The article, “Capacity for Progress,” gives examples of how the Capacity Project is using information technology (IT) in Africa and discusses how the resulting systems can be used to support planning and management of the health workforce.
One of the examples points out how the Project’s HRIS strengthening work in Uganda is helping the MOH and 4 councils have accurate and accessible data on their health workforce. For many African countries, health workforce data is still in paper form and stored in different places and therefore difficult to aggregate. This was the case when the Capacity Project started working in Uganda a few years ago. Although one could find out how many nurses passed their final exam, they didn’t know how many went on to become licensed, where they were deployed, or how many were leaving the health workforce. Now, the country is almost finished transitioning from their paper-based system to an electronic system – the MOH and 3 of the councils have finished entering data into their iHRIS Manage and iHRIS Qualify software. The article highlights how information already available from their iHRIS Qualify system has been combined with geographical information system mapping to illustrate health worker issues, such as comparing rural and urban deployment to HIV/AIDS prevalence. This type of information and presentation can inspire targeted workforce interventions such as creating incentives for nurses to return to their home regions to work.
The article also discusses the Project’s work in S. Sudan to help develop a resource center in Juba Teaching Hospital. The article states that the center is unique in S. Sudan and has become a communications hub for hospital staff. The center has a library of medical books and journals, seven computers for staff to use, and a satellite has been installed for internet access.
Half of the article is dedicated to exploring how mobile phones and handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs) can be used to improve health service information and delivery. The Capacity Project is exploring how these devices can be used to collect information for health management information systems and to disseminate health information in rural areas. For instance, a text message can be sent out to alert health professionals of a disease outbreak. In the next year, the Capacity Project will focus on how mobile technology can be used to access health workers in very remote areas, like those working with nomadic tribes in Kenya. The article points out that mobile nurses can reduce maternal mortality rates by using mobile technology to quickly diagnose and address critical issues.
The Capacity Project HRIS team is hoping to write additional articles this year to submit to peer-reviewed journals.
What is happening with HRIS Strengthening? Get news about our ongoing work in the field, find out when new features and releases of the software are available, learn more about human resource information systems, and join the conversation. Your comments and questions are welcome.