Resources

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.

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?

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.

Pick up any popular magazine or newsletter these days and you will probably find an article about some aspect of communications technology. Whether the article is about how to hook up to the World Wide Web, how to search and receive information electronically, or how to avoid telephone charges by using e-mail to communicate with friends and colleagues, these technologies have a strong presence.

The experience of community based family planning programs in Indonesia and Bangladesh, demonstrates that simple geographical maps can serve as useful information tools in helping family planning workers or volunteers to understand their community and its contraceptive needs.

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.