We are not workforce planning experts, yet it is one of our goals for the Capacity Project to develop user-friendly health workforce planning software specifically for low-resource countries. Last week, we brought together a group of workforce planning experts from all over the world, representing countries like Finland and Uganda and organizations like the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the Asia-Pacific Action Alliance on Human Resources for Health. Our goal was to select a workforce planning model we could base our software on, specify features for the software and form a working group to advise on the software development.
Workforce planning expert Peter Hornby explains the complexities of workforce planning to workshop participants.
The most exciting aspect of the workshop for me was the conversation, which was constant, lively and collaborative. Everyone agreed that software was sorely needed. The greatest need for the software is to present a complex task in a simpler way so that planners and policy makers can easly analyze data about their health workforce and plan for the future.
The conversation revolved around the many complexities of workforce planning, such as ensuring that plans are affordable and balancing the needs of different geographical areas in a country, as well as the private and public sectors. Many issues we hadn’t even considered were raised by our group of experts. For example, I hadn’t realized that the data requirements for short-term and long-term projections are very different, yet both are crucial for effective planning. It was also important to consider how our software will help planners present their recommendations to decision makers in government, other stakeholders and even the media.
Finally, I learned that there is an art to workforce planinng, as well as a science. The planner must stand back and take a look at the set of assumptions made about the future of the workforce, and then fine-tune those assumptions to adjust for the context of that country. How can we support this artistic process in software? At this point, I’m not sure.
We walked away with a robust set of suggestions for how to start our first iteration of development, which is scheduled for piloting in Namibia only six months from now. And I learned more about the nuances and complexities of workforce planning than I ever imagined. Now the real fun begins as we start developing the software. But with this group of experts ready to provide suggestions, test prototypes and help write the documentation, I feel confident that we can produce an extremely useful tool. I, for one, am looking forward to the conversation continuing.
Workforce planning experts gathered together for a two-day workshop at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., to define specifications for workforce planning software.
Does workforce planning excite you? We are looking for contributors to help us develop our Open Source workforce planning software. We need help with documentation, testing and programming. If you’re interested, leave a comment or contact us.
Posted by
Shannon Turlington on 12/19/2007 • Tags: ICT4d, Software, Workforce planning, Workshops
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“Indeed, few countries in sub-Saharan Africa even know precisely how many health workers they have and where those workers are distributed. More than 40 percent of these countries lack data on how many community health workers operate within their borders, for instance. NGOs can help fill such information gaps. They should start by teaming up with the Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA) and other multilateral groups to help answer, for example, basic questions about the distribution of human resources at the district level and the availability of infrastructure and medical supplies in rural areas. Current efforts to elicit this information should be expanded.” - McKinsey Report: “Addressing Africa’s Health Workforce Crisis”
On Tuesday and Wednesday, December 11 and 12, the Capacity Project’s HRIS Strengthening team is presenting a PEPFAR-funded workshop to launch a comprehensive human resource information system inventory project and begin building a community of practice. Fifty HRH informatics leaders from USAID, the Office of the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC), the World Health Organization (WHO), the World Bank and a wide variety of nongovernmental organizations, universities and regional representatives are gathering to seek better alignment, understanding and coordination of efforts to overcome the barriers to accurate and timely health worker information in countries around the world.
On Thursday and Friday, thirty of these leaders, representing every major contributor, past and present, in the field of international health workforce planning, are coming together to design the first user-friendly health workforce planning software, iHRIS Plan. Previous planning models over the last thirty years have only been available in cumbersome and notoriously difficult spreadsheets, only understood by expensive and difficult-to-hire consultants. IntraHealth’s team of Open Source software developers will be working with this group of experts to build truly usable, free and open software allowing countries to:
- analyze their health workforce
- project the workforce’s growth or decline into the future
- anticipate future workforce needs
- and model interventions to close the gap between the two.
The input of these experts in HRIS and workforce planning should be invaluable in producing two worthwhile products: a database of HRIS strengthening activities going on in countries around the world, and easy-to-use modeling and planning software that we can distribute free to workforce planners in developing countries.
Posted by
Dykki Settle on 12/11/2007 • Tags: Events, HRH, HRIS, ICT4d, News, Software, Workforce planning, Workshops
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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Virtue. One thing that has been lost over time with the word “virtue”, which we can rediscover with the etymology of the word, is that it is supposed to be habitual. The original Greek context of the word is habitual excellence. I must admit preferring that interpretation of the word over what it has come to mean since.
When thinking about virtues in the sense of trying to achieve habitual excellence I remember an article written by Yochai Benkler and Helen Nissenbaum: “Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue (PDF).” In it, Benkler and Nissenbaum suggest that commons-based “peer production offers an opportunity for more people to engage in practices that permit them to exhibit and experience virtuous behavior.” In other words, releasing your code or content in an open fashion, or joining in on an open source project is a good practice that provides a chance at “habitual excellence.” More simply, there is virtue in open source. It’s not clear to me that the majority of people involved in open source projects are doing so simply to be good citizens or to blatantly achieve habitual excellence. In Some Simple Economics of Open Source (PDF) Lerner and Tirole wrote “Any explanation [of the many contributions made to open source projects] based on altruism only goes so far.”
I find that most people working in open source do not consider their contributions the same as charitable works. Perhaps it is more simply a part of their computing environment. To many contributors, it is as natural to log in to IRC and answer a question or submit a small patch to share a fix to a problem as it is to configure the desktop background. Nonetheless, there is at the heart of this openness a belief that the proprietary system of development and distribution of software is inherently wrong. It’s not just a matter of wanting to, as Bill and Ted said, “be excellent to each other“, more it’s an understanding of, and desire to work within, the correct system (a common trait with the better engineers). When it comes to code, the system of transparency is the correct way, it is the excellence.
It is true that transparency is not always a virtue. Transparency can be a virtue by enabling feedback. But transparency, if it is one sided, can also be dangerous. People are threatened by transparency because we all have secrets, and usually don’t want to share them. That said, institutional transparency can help all of us because it improves trust and creates a system which steers us towards honesty. If we assume that the system is transparent then that guides our behavior. Just as Benkler and Nissenbaum note about Wikipedia and its “self-conscious use of open discourse”. The participants of Wikipedia know the realm in which they work, they understand the goal and their work fits into that goal without over-reaching protections and restrictions. If we are used to systems that hide our actions then transparency is a threat. However, if we understand a system’s goals, processes, and implementation, and are allowed to work within it (or even experiment in it), we will respect the framework while doing so.
Institutional, or system-based transparency is easier to explain, and more easily understood in the realm of code and by technical people. This is because it is already organic to their ethos. They get it immediately because, despite making us hole up in dark rooms with our screens shining their warm, familiar glow on our faces, our computers have become social tools. Despite our redefinition of the term, we do interact with each other through our technology. This is important because the act of sharing is built into this grander social network. I use the word ethos to define this because sharing is the distinct spirit of what is going on in the technical world. The more interesting part of this is that that spirit has now moved into other areas that the technology has forced itself into. Media being the prime examples: photos, music, movies. Transparency is not a natural tendency to those who have been creating such media before now. This has slowly changed with the introduction of licenses such as the Creative Commons, and with successful experiments such as Radiohead’s latest release, In Rainbows. Sharing works, especially when all parties understand the system and the intent behind the sharing, has become most apparently beneficial to distribution and dissimination.
This should be no different for health. Health is one of our foremost human concerns. To successfully treat health problems around the globe there must be sharing. There must be transparency. This is important for all aspects of health systems, from the information that guides our understanding and diagnosis of problems, to the tools we use to facilitate the vast amount of work that needs to be done. Without transparency where is our health? Locked in trade secrets? Protected from our understanding for what gain?
The good news is that we are on the right track. We’ve been working hard on our code, which is all being developed in a fully transparent manner, but we are also doing a great deal to make sure our information is available too. The last couple weeks I’ve been learning more about the great work the folks in the Global Resource Center are doing and find their freely available information truly inspiring. I think there are probably areas within our work in which we can be even more transparent, not just so that others may benefit from our knowledge, but so that we can then benefit from theirs as they join in on the habitual excellence we are working with in being transparent. And join they will. Not just to be altuistic, but because the system of transparency we are engaging in is the correct system for health.
Posted by
David Mason on 12/6/2007 • Tags: Activism, Community, FOSS, Open Source, Public Health, Sustainability
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