Much was accomplished in December at the PEPFAR-funded HRIS Inventory Project workshop. Leaders from several partner and donor organizations gathered to review the project scope, suggest improvements to the proposed data framework, and define the data elements necessary to capture an informative systems inventory in their areas of expertise. Participants grouped themselves into areas of focus and expressed interest in continuing to support the inventory project. We will continue to work with these focus groups to develop communities of practice and help each define best practices in their fields.
The project team is currently compiling and digesting information from the workshop and will share with all participants via email and the Capacity website. In addition, as use cases are re-written based on feedback obtained in the workshop we will share with the focus groups for suggested improvements.
Posted by
Angela Self on 1/27/2008 • Tags: Community, HRH, HRIS, Information Systems, Workshops
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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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