Resources

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

With the increased focus on achieving programmatic impact, managers must pay close attention to whether their programs, and the services provided through their programs, are meeting the needs of their clients, are being provided efficiently and effectively, and are contributing to the achievement of organizational and program objectives.

Since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo, family planning managers are rising to the challenge to offer a broader scope of reproductive health services to their clients.

Family planning managers need a simple information system to help them monitor, improve, and expand services. Creating a practical decision making system for the local level of a family planning program requires the participation of managers at all levels of the program.

In the private as well as the public sector, volunteer boards of directors are being increasingly recognized as contributors to the success of family planning organizations. Organizations that work with a formal board of directors, or a less formal advisory or managing board can benefit from the broadened vision, experience, and skills that a board provides.

This issue of The Manager outlines the connections between work climate, employee motivation, and performance. It describes how managers can assess the climate in their work group and shows how they can use the results to make changes in leadership and management practices that will motivate their group to do the best work possible and improve results.

Numerous small-scale efforts to change practices often improve the health of clients in one clinical setting or community, but their effects frequently decrease over time. The way these change efforts are introduced may cause their results to fade in the months after a project ends. How they are designed and implemented may hinder their expansion to additional clinical settings or communities.

Human resources are central to planning, managing, and delivering health services. In most countries personnel account for a high proportion of the national budget for the health sector—often 75 percent or more.