Associate, Health Workforce at Clinton Health Access Initiative

CHAI Health Workforce Background

• A skilled health workforce is the backbone of every health system and therefore an essential precondition for progress toward universal health coverage (UHC). However, the WHO estimates that there is a global shortage of 18 million health workers. The gap is most acute in Africa (with a shortage of 4.2 million), which bears 24% of the global burden of disease yet has only 4% of the world’s health workforce.
• CHAI assists governments to develop their health workforces by enhancing their capacity to train highly qualified health workers and by strengthening national systems to finance, deploy, and manage those health workers.  CHAI’s approach to health workforce strengthening is context-specific, and depends significantly on the nature of the challenges and opportunities in a given country. In several cases, CHAI has partnered with government leaders like those in Liberia and Rwanda to plan for and implement long-term, national pre-service training scale-up programs designed to dramatically increase the number of health care providers in the country—from community health workers to pediatric surgeons.
• This work involves supporting government leaders to set the vision for the future workforce, ensure absorption capacity for those workers, and then develop and mobilize resources for detailed costed plans to expand training capacity in select pre-service training programs for health workers through investments in infrastructure, equipment, faculty development, and visiting faculty to fill gaps and rapidly increase scale.
• In other contexts, significant workforce expansion may not be possible, so CHAI instead works with governments to get the best out of their existing workforces through management interventions that ensure health workers are effectively deployed, supported, trained, and supervised.
• These kinds of interventions can be particularly critical at the primary care level, where governments may not have the ability to dramatically expand their primary care workforces, but seek opportunities to improve the availability and quality of essential services provided at that level.
• Community health workers are proven to be cost-effective in expanding access to critical preventive, promotive, and basic curative services. Community health systems play an essential role in connecting people to the care they need, and CHAI has worked with governments in several countries to design, refine, and scale national integrated community health models that deliver essential primary care services, reduce verticalization and fragmentation, and improve health access and outcomes.Currently, CHAI is focused on health workforce programming in Ethiopia, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Position Overview

• This role will work with CHAI’s Health Workforce Global Team, which provides strategic and technical support across CHAI’s health workforce portfolio. This position will be at least 50% dedicated to a project in Nigeria designed to improve utilization of gender-responsive and essential SRMCH services for vulnerable groups in six states. The position will also support various analytical and other project workstreams on the CHAI Health Workforce Team, including a multi-country project to support health worker interventions for scale up of COVID-19 testing.
• The primary work will involve supporting the Nigeria team in structuring HRH analyses and identifying interventions to improve health worker availability as well as performance.
• Opportunities may include designing and conducting analyses to improve deployment/distribution of health workers, informing supervision schemes and initiatives to improve performance and quality, and adapting HRH related tools to the Nigerian context, all with the goal to ensure appropriate staffing for primary health care facilities to provide a minimum package of services.
• In addition, the Associate will support the CHAI Health Workforce Global team with other projects as required. One such project will be in conjunction with the CHAI Laboratory Services Team to support COVID-19 testing expansion in countries across Africa through development of interventions related to governance, health worker training, information systems and more. Other projects could include but not limited to supporting analytics to help Ministries develop national health worker targets for prioritized cadres as well as modeling health worker training enrollment scale-up to meet targets.
• The candidate will work across several country programs and will have additional cross-cutting responsibilities supporting the CHAI Health Workforce Global Team and, therefore, must have a demonstrated ability to produce high quality work independently and manage multiple workstreams.
• The ideal candidate is highly familiar with key health systems strengthening concepts and approaches and topics in health workforce development.
• This position will report to a Manager on the CHAI Health Workforce Global Team, who will provide technical guidance and oversight to the position. The role will ideally be based in Nigeria but can be flexibly based in any of several CHAI program countries in Africa, depending on work permissions. The extent of travel required for the role will be dependent on COVID-19 travel policies.

Responsibilities

• Serve as a thought partner and technical backstop to design and implement analyses related to health workforce distribution and performance.
• Design analyses to understand current HRH situation and gaps across primary health facilities.
• Design data collection materials that will interface with Nigeria State teams to gather required inputs.
• Analyze data and design templates and tools to enable the project team to analyze data routinely.
• Using the findings from above-described analytical assessments, support development of interventions that aim to close identified health worker gaps across PHC facilities.
• Use quantitative models and analyses to estimate national staffing targets and/or create workforce pipeline models.
• Develop clear communication materials based upon analyses, and present analytical findings to internal and external audiences
• Assist with management of project work plans and schedules to ensure timely achievement of milestones.
• Provide analytical support for other projects as needed.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's Degree or equivalent plus 3 - 4 years work experience; or Advanced Degree plus 1 - 2 years work experience, with preference for healthcare experience, management consulting, or similar environment
• Excellent analytical skills, including strong quantitative modelling skills and experience developing tools in Microsoft Excel
• Demonstrated strong problem-solving skills
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills in English, including the ability to prepare and present information in a compelling manner
• Ability to communicate effectively with people of varied professional, cultural, and educational backgrounds
• Entrepreneurial mindset: demonstrated ability to work independently on complex projects and solve challenging problems in a high-pressure, fast-paced environment
• Exceptional task management skills including developing work plans and tracking tools to meet project deadlines
• Very high attention to detail
• Ability to work with teams across time zones and locations
• Ability to work with humility and achieve results
• High levels of proficiency in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and internet applications

Advantages:

• Advanced degree in a related field such as health economics, public health, financial management, business preferred
• Experience using advanced statistical and data programming skills to manage and analyze data (e.g., R, SAS, Stata)
• Previous experience working in health systems strengthening or health workforce in LMICs
• Experience working in developing countries, particularly in the health sector and in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Experience working with country governments and international partners