Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE—April 19, 2004

Send this press release to a colleague

BALTIMORE—How can family planning programs provide better services to clients and offer more satisfying work to staff using the resources they have? Reorganizing work processes offers one common-sense way, according to a new issue of Population Reports from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

"Often, simple changes to processes and procedures can help address major work-related problems. Improving the organization of work need not be time-consuming, complicated, or expensive," according to the report published by the INFO Project at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs.

The report was prepared in collaboration with the Maximizing Access and Quality (MAQ) Initiative (http://www.maqweb.org) of the United States Agency for International Development's Office of Population and Reproductive Health. The MAQ Initiative's Subcommittee on Organization of Work has identified nine key elements of service delivery where organization of work can make a difference. The Population Reports issue, prepared by Vidya Setty, draws on examples from around the world to illustrate how guiding principles for each of the elements can be put into practice:

• Use evidence-based practices to provide effective health care efficiently. When hospitals in Russia updated diagnostic criteria and treatment procedures for pregnancy-induced hypertension, fewer women were diagnosed with the condition needlessly. Costs declined.



• Be able to adapt, modify approaches as need arises, and plan for variation in demand and services. Two district health centers in Moldova swapped supplies to avoid wasting overstocked contraceptives whose expiration dates were approaching.



• Improve links with other services and sites so that clients can obtain appropriate care at each level of the health-care system. In Pakistan more than 12,000 private doctors, pharmacists, and lady health visitors are linked nationwide in a tiered referral network.



• Minimize paperwork and maximize information use. Organizations can collect only the data they need, make good use of what they collect, and empower staff to act on the information. Following a reorganization of data collection processes, health workers at a rural hospital in Rajasthan, India, used immunization dropout rates to plan better childhood immunization coverage.



• Pay attention to physical factors and encourage staff to be resourceful when using facilities, space, and when maintaining adequate supplies. In Camaçari, Brazil, the health center director reorganized services across the four wings of a clinic to reduce client and provider traffic and improve infection prevention.



• Tailor service hours and scheduling to meet clients' and providers' needs. In one Senegalese clinic, providers scheduled clients' next visits to coincide with their need for to interact with providers. Staff at a Jordanian hospital gained efficiencies by creating separate pre-screening and triage areas to determine who needed care immediately and who could be referred to the outpatient department.



• Clearly define division of labor and job designs to give staff members the authority for their work, to delegate work to the lowest-level provider appropriate, and to encourage teamwork. In Costa Rica nurses and physicians from the outpatient department of a clinic formed a cross-functional team with clerical staff from the medical records to decide how to shorten retrieval time for the records.



• Consider social factors, such as leadership, supervision, and positive human relationships, that motivate staff and maintain open lines of communication. In Uganda, after clinic supervisors were given a day's training on supervisory techniques, staff members reported receiving more and clearer feedback on their job performance.

The report also suggests steps that staff can take to begin reorganizing work practices.

Full text of the report can be seen on line at: http://www.populationreports.org/q02/. For printed copies of the report send an e-mail to Orders@jhuccp.org, or write to Orders Department, Johns Hopkins University, Center for Communication Programs, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, Maryland 21202, USA. A web-based order form can be found at: http://www.jhuccp.org/cgi-bin/orders/orderform.cgi.

Population Reports is an international review journal of important issues in population, family planning, and related matters. It is published four times a year in three languages by the Information for Optimal Health (INFO) project at the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, Bloomberg School of Public Health, for more than 160,000 family planning and other health professionals worldwide, with support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID). USAID administers the US foreign assistance program, providing economic and humanitarian assistance in more than 80 countries worldwide.

For more information contact: Stephen Goldstein at Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, 111 Market Place, Suite 310, Baltimore, Maryland 21202, USA. Tel: 410 659-6331; Fax: 410 659-6266 e-mail: PopRepts@jhuccp.org or press@jhuccp.org. WEB SITE: http://www.infoforhealth.org

Disclaimer: The information provided on this web site is not official U.S. Government information and does not represent the views or positions of the U.S. Agency for International Development or the U.S. Government.