Effective scale-up: avoiding the same old traps

Despite progress in developing more effective training methodologies, training initiatives for health workers continue to experience common pitfalls that have beset the overall success and cost-effectiveness of these programs for decades. These include lack of country-level coordination of health training, inequitable access to training, interrupted services, and failure to reinforce skills and knowledge training by addressing other performance factors. These pitfalls are now seen as aggravating the current crisis in human resources for health and impeding the effective scale-up of training and the potential impact of promising strategies such as task shifting to address health worker shortages. Drawing on IntraHealth International's lessons learned in designing reproductive health and HIV/AIDS training and performance improvement programmes, this commentary discusses promising practices for strengthening human resources for health through more efficient and effective training and learning programmes that avoid the same old traps. These promising practices include the following

Incentives for retaining and motivating health workers in Pacific and Asian countries

This paper was initiated by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) after identifying the need for an in-depth synthesis and analysis of available literature and information on incentives for retaining health workers in the Asia-Pacific region. The objectives of this paper are to

Determinants of infant and child health and survival in Sierra Leone : a research proposal

Meeting: Research Issues in Child Health and Child Care, 22-26 Sept. 1986, Accra, GHIn IDL-99