Seminar: Strategies to improve health worker performance in low income settings - a systematic review

Dr Alex Rowe presents a seminar on strategies to improve health worker performance in low income settings: methods and early findings.

Health workers in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) play key roles in improving quality and coverage of health interventions, however their performance is often inadequate. Existing reviews of strategies to improve performance have important methodological limitations. The objective of the Health Care Provider Performance Review is to systematically review published and unpublished studies to characterise the effectiveness and costs of strategies to improve health worker performance in LMICs. All strategies were included for any type of health worker (including community health workers, pharmacists, and workers in drug shops) for any health condition. The review involved a search of 15 electronic databases, 29 document inventories of international organizations, and bibliographies of 510 reviews and other articles. More than 105,000 citations were screened, and 841 reports met our inclusion criteria. These reports corresponded to 509 studies in 83 countries. The objectives of the seminar are to share preliminary results and obtain feedback from the audience on the methods and results.

Speaker: Alex Rowe is a medical epidemiologist with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Malaria Branch. He received an MD from Cornell University and an MPH from Emory University. He has worked at the Center for Disease Control since 1994: 2 years in the chronic diseases center, 5 years in an international child survival unit, and 10 years in the Malaria Branch. Key interests include improving health worker performance in developing countries (for all diseases, not just malaria), strategies to strengthen health systems, monitoring and evaluation methods, and systematic reviews. He is the author or co-author of more than 45 scientific publications.