A descriptive study on health workforce performance after decentralisation of health services in Uganda

Human Resources for Health

Research

Janetta Hendrika Roos¹  Bethabile Lovely Dolamo¹  George William Lutwama² 

[1] Department of Health Studies, PO Box 392, 0003, Pretoria, Unisa, South Africa;Graduate, Department of Health Studies, Unisa & IMA World Health Sudd Health Project, IMA World Health, PO Box 429, 500 Main Street, 21776, New Windsor, MD, USA;

关键词: Health workers;    Health workforce;    Decentralisation;    Performance;    Health sector reforms;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1478-4491-10-41

 received in 2012-02-27, accepted in 2012-10-22,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundUganda, like many developing countries, is committed to achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. However, serious challenges prove to hamper the attainment of these goals, particularly the health related MDGs. A major challenge relates to the human resources for health. The health system in Uganda was decentralised in the 1990s. Despite the health sector reforms, the services have remained significantly deficient and performance of health workers is thought to be one of the contributing factors. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to investigate the performance of health workers after decentralisation of the health services in Uganda in order to identify and suggest possible areas for improvement.MethodsA cross-sectional descriptive survey, using quantitative research methods was utilised. A structured self-administered questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data from 276 health workers in the districts of Kumi, Mbale, Sironko and Tororo in Eastern Uganda. The health workers included doctors, clinical officers, professional nurses and midwives. The sample was selected using stratified random sampling. The data was analysed using SPSS version 18.0 and included both univariate and bivariate analysis. The results were presented in tabular and text forms.ResultsThe study revealed that even though the health workers are generally responsive to the needs of their clients, the services they provide are often not timely. The health workers take initiatives to ensure that they are available for work, although low staffing levels undermine these efforts. While the study shows that the health workers are productive, over half (50.4%) of them reported that their organisations do not have indicators to measure their individual performance. The findings indicate that the health workers are skilled and competent to perform their duties. In general, the results show that health workers are proficient, adaptive, proactive and client-oriented.ConclusionAlthough Uganda is faced with a number of challenges as regards human resources for health, the findings show that the health workers that are currently working in the health facilities are enthusiastic to perform. This may serve as a motivator for the health workers to improve their performance and that of the health sector.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Lutwama et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.