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Workforce Planning and Leadership |
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Technical Expertise / Workforce Planning and Leadership
To strengthen health care, countries need accurate data and professional leadership to
support strategic planning of human resources for health (HRH). The Capacity Project aimed to achieve the following
results within the area of workforce planning and leadership:
- Strengthened human resources information systems (HRIS)
- Improved workforce planning, allocation and utilization
- Strengthened workforce policies
- Effective multisectoral stakeholder workforce planning groups
- Strengthened human resources management (HRM)
- Increased numbers and types of health workers deployed.
The most significant results included developing and applying an HRIS strengthening
process and transferring HRIS software technology to the field; supporting HR strategic
policy and plan development and implementation; and building HRH leadership and
management skills, both at the country level and by contributing to the growth of an
HRH leadership cadre in sub-Saharan Africa.
Lessons learned:
- Developing foundational systems such as HRIS helped to move HRH leadership
to more strategic and data-driven decision-making. The link to using the data
is not automatic, however, and workshops focusing on data-driven decision-making
can be a very important tool in helping to get senior HRH leaders to
use the more accurate data that becomes available through improved HRIS.
- HRM systems in the health sector are typically very weak, and these weak systems
threaten to impede progress on all significant HRH interventions. Work to raise
awareness about the need to strengthen HRM systems is ongoing, and the Project
played an important role in raising this issue, but it needs significant future attention.
- A six-month blended learning program as piloted in Kenya holds much promise
for building a critical mass of HR professionals at the country level, and
creating an HRM reference group in the process.
- Fundamental changes in basic HR processes like recruitment and posting are very
important to undertake and can have far-reaching results that go beyond the process
itself. In Kenya, for example, the process modeled a more transparent and fair location-based
recruiting and placement system that the government may adopt in the long
run. These types of fundamental changes take time, however, as they frequently involve
entities outside the health sector, raise difficult issues and are often highly political.
- Task shifting is more likely to be successful when closely linked to policy change.
Learn more about the Project’s workforce planning and leadership results.
Related resources:
See other areas in Technical Expertise: Workforce Development; Performance Support; Knowledge Management
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