Resources

Results 51 - 75 of 1434

Charging Fees for Family Planning Services

Governments in the developing world pay for between 63 and 75 percent of all family planning costs, international donor agencies pay for between 15 and 20 percent, and the clients themselves pay for between 10 and 17 percent of the costs of services [Lande and Geller 1991].

Conducting Local Rapid Assessments in Districts and Communities

Increasingly health and family planning programs are decentralizing managerial responsibilities. As a result, managers at the local and district level need to make strategic decisions so that their programs will continue to meet the health needs of the communities they serve.

Decentralizing Health and Family Planning Services

In recent years, some ministries of health around the world have embarked on a process of decentralization.

Developing Managers Who Lead

How can health programs and organizations achieve results under increasingly complex and changing conditions? How can health managers focus their organizations on tackling complicated problems, such as HIV/AIDS or organizational restructuring?

Developing Plans and Proposals for New Initiatives

Governments and donor organizations are eager to support program initiatives that create new family planning services, or expand existing services to reach underserved populations. Funders are interested in a wide variety of new initiatives, such as adolescent services, mobile clinics in rural areas, in-school information, education, and communication (IEC) programs, and many others.

Focusing on Customer Service

Customer service is a powerful tool that helps managers focus their services on what customers, or clients, want and need.

Forming Partnerships to Improve Public Health

Partnerships between two or more organizations can be effective vehicles for achieving important public health goals.

Human Resources: Managing and Developing Your Most Important Asset

Human Resource Development (HRD) is a strategic and comprehensive management area that involves establishing policies, practices, and administrative structures that focus on an organization’s most valuable resource--its people.HRD is a leadership, financial, and management issue. Personnel costs consume 70 to 80% of the budget of most organizations.

Improving Contraceptive Supply Management

Having the right contraceptives on hand to meet the needs of all clients builds confidence in the services, helps ensure that the clients will keep coming back to the clinic, and helps prevent unwanted pregnancies.The contraceptive supply systems used by family planning programs differ from program to program.

Improving Drug Management to Control Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis (TB) is a highly contagious disease that people catch after inhaling a very small number of TB germs and becoming infected. One-third of the world’s population is currently infected with the TB bacillus, and five to ten percent of these people will become sick or infectious at some time during their life. Nearly one third of people with HIV are also infected with TB.

Improving Supervision: A Team Approach

Supervision is so important to getting things done that most family planning organizations have developed a formal supervisory structure staffed with "supervisors" to help them ensure that activities are supervised. These "supervisors" work alongside managers who also perform their own supervisory activities on a day-to-day basis.

Increasing Community Participation in Family Planning Programs

Community participation has long been recognized as an effective means of helping rural and urban people focus energy and mobilize resources to solve their health, environmental, and economic problems.

Learning to Think Strategically

Strategic thinking is a powerful skill that clinic managers and supervisors can use in creating clinic or program plans designed to meet future goals and effectively use available resources. In the past, formulating strategy has been reserved for senior managers and policy makers of large organizations.

Making Your Clinic Building Work

When the demand for services increases or a program expands the range of health and reproductive health services it offers, the staff of a health facility can quickly become overwhelmed.

Managing Integrated Services

Family planning managers are frequently being asked to add or integrate family planning services into maternal and child health (MCH), nutrition, women's reproductive health, adult literacy, and other health and development activities. Consequently, managers are asking questions about exactly when, where, and how family planning services can be integrated with these other activities.

Managing Reproductive Health Services with a Gender Perspective

Gender is one of the most important factors to consider in designing, managing, and delivering reproductive health services. Yet gender may also be the least understood characteristic in terms of how women’s and men’s health needs differ and how those differences can best be addressed.

Marketing Your Organization's Services

Health organizations are increasingly functioning in a marketplace where other health organizations offer similar services to overlapping populations. As a result of such competition for users, more and more organizations are turning to marketing to help them both to identify and better serve their target populations’ needs and to increase and sustain demand for their services.

Mobilizing Local Resources to Support Health Programs

Local resources can significantly contribute to national governments’ and external donors’ efforts to maintain and extend health programs.

Planning for Leadership Transition

No leader of an organization can last forever, but staff often behave as if their leader were immortal. Understandably, the staff may not want to spotlight the need to plan for a transition if their current leader is effective, or if the leader is ineffective but powerful and well connected.

Planning for Sustainability: Assessing the Management Capabilities of Your Organization

The ability to assess an organization’s management capabilities is rapidly becoming a critical skill for health and family planning managers. As policy makers, national program planners, and donors take an increasingly critical look at program priorities and the use of available resources, their attention is drawn to how well organizations and programs operate.

Reducing Client Waiting Time

The topic for this issue, "Reducing Client Waiting Time," addresses a common problem for managers of family planning programs. Long waits in clinic waiting areas can create barriers that prevent your services from reaching family planning clients.

Reducing Discontinuation in Family Planning Programs

Anyone who has ever worked in a family planning program will be all too aware that efforts to attract and recruit new clients will be only partially successful if the program fails to keep those new clients. How can the universally troubling problem of discontinuers best be addressed by program managers?

Turning Research into Action: The Decision-Linked Research Approach

For over twenty years, managers of health programs have relied on many types of research to help answer strategic and programmatic questions. Demographic surveys, rapid assessments, operations research, and sociological and economic studies contribute significantly to The Manager’s ability to formulate appropriate goals, determine strategies, and assess the achievement of program goals.

Understanding and Using Financial Management Systems to Make Decisions

Many program managers consider financial management a complex, uninteresting, or even frightening topic. They may prefer to leave the responsibility for financial management in the hands of accountants, bookkeepers, and finance officers. Today, however, organizations rely on all their managers to help allocate and monitor resources in order to achieve programmatic goals.

Using Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI)

Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) is an exciting management approach that is being introduced in family planning programs around the world. CQI is based on the belief that anybody at any level of the organization can make valuable suggestions about ways to improve operations.