Human Resources for Health Inventory Tool to Assess Donor-Supported HIV Workers

WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM?

PEPFAR, The Global Fund, and other donors have invested millions of dollars to supplement the budgets of governments for human resources for health (HRH) and health worker staffing. Yet, there is a need for greater data to inform who the donor-supported workers are, where they are located, related costs, and status of alignment with existing host-country government structures and policies.  Donors and host governments need better tools to understand the scope and nature of staffing investments in order to optimize health worker utilization to advance epidemic control and to inform sustainability planning once epidemic control is achieved.

WHAT IS THE TOOL?

The HRH Inventory Tool [781 KB] provides countries with a wealth of information about donor investments in HRH, from the job titles of health workers supported to the names of facilities where health workers are based, and includes detailed information on health worker gender, experience, compensation, and professional development. By inventorying donor investments in HRH, development partners and host governments can more easily track and analyze investments in HRH staffing, down to the site level, which can be utilized for more robust sector-wide performance monitoring and program planning. It also can support a mapping of donor-supported workers to host government cadres and pay bands, where available, to inform stronger alignment of donor support. The HRH Tool does not require that users collect all of the elements within the tool, but rather should be customized to meet the needs of the country’s program based on subject matter expert and country Chair feedback.

The HRH Inventory Tool is available online for donors and host governments to download. An accompanying two-page overview and webinar recording are available to guide donors and host governments through the inventory process. Using the HRH inventory, donors and host governments can:

• Customize the HRH Inventory Tool – Users can customize the tool with information specific to a country’s health sector, such as drop downs for localities, facilities, technical areas, and to reflect local context and programming needs;
• Populate the HRH Inventory Tool – Users work with implementing partners and principal recipients who directly support health workers to populate, clean and validate the data entered into the tool capturing the current donor-supported workforce;
• Map donor-supported staff to Government Equivalencies –  Users can map the donor-supported workforce to government cadre and pay scales, to determine if the investments are well-aligned with public service;
• Analyze donor-supported investments – Users can analyze the HRH Inventory data, down to the site level, for sector-wide performance monitoring, program planning and MER reporting. Examples of possible analytic visualizations/dashboards are included below.

To date, the HRH inventory tool has been populated and those data have been analyzed in 5 countries. In Tanzania, the HRH Inventory is used to track and manage PEPFAR-supported investments in over 16,000 healthcare workers nationally. In Lesotho, the HRH Inventory revealed how donors collectively are amplifying government staffing, and highlighted the need to rationalize lay cadres to support governments’ HIV policies and task sharing models. In Eswatini, the HRH Inventory Tool is influencing government-led HRH transition analysis and plans, and raised the visibility of facility-based lay cadres. In Namibia, the HRH Inventory is supporting stakeholders’ consultations on sustaining gains in HIV epidemic control, even as donors withdraw.

Some additional information can be found here!

HRH Inventory Tool (Excel) [781 KB]