142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition

Annual Meeting Recordings are now available for purchase

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“That's Improvement!”: Uganda Focuses on Health Workers

142nd APHA Annual Meeting and Exposition (November 15 - November 19, 2014): http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Tuesday, November 18, 2014 : 9:22 AM - 9:30 AM

Carol Bales , Communications, Knowledge Management, and Advocacy Department, IntraHealth International, Chapel Hill, NC
Sarah Dwyer, Master's degree in International Studies , Communications, Knowledge Management, and Advocacy Department, IntraHealth International, Chapel Hill, NC
Meet three Ugandan health workers who love their jobs. Agnes, Habiba, and Alex find joy in serving their clients, but they face many challenges—and there are simply not enough health workers to meet the demand.

To improve health services, Uganda is focusing on the people that provide quality care. In this video by Carol Bales and Sarah Dwyer, we see how the country’s efforts are paying off—and how service delivery has improved.

Through the engaging voices of Agnes, Habiba, Alex, and their managers, we learn how:

  • a six-month course helped teams improve leadership and management at the district level
  • several tools are helping health leaders use data to make evidence-based decisions about the workforce
  • health leaders successfully advocated for funding to support health worker recruitment and wage increases.

This video is intended to 1) provide a positive example of a country that is using innovative and inexpensive approaches to make the best use of the health workers it has while successfully advocating for increased funding to hire more of them, 2) encourage other countries to adapt the same free tools and approaches, and 3) offeri a compelling example to encourage participants to support health workforce strengthening.

Learning Areas:

Administration, management, leadership
Implementation of health education strategies, interventions and programs
Provision of health care to the public

Learning Objectives:
Identify health workforce challenges that Uganda and other developing countries are facing. Discuss how these challenges are affecting the delivery of quality health care. Compare Uganda's response with what other countries are doing, including the United States. Describe how Uganda's focus on health workers is improving service delivery in the country.

Keyword(s): Provision of health care to the public

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I am an experienced communications professional who focuses on the health workforce, contributing expertise in writing and editing, social media, dissemination, and multimedia production. I am inspired by the frontline health workers I have interviewed and spent time with in Uganda, along with stories of other dedicated health workers around the world collected by my colleagues. I especially like mixing these personal testimonies with photographs and video to communicate health workforce challenges and successes.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.