[MUSIC] I'd like to welcome you to the course. This is Bill Brieger. I will be approaching the course from my experience having worked at the African Regional Health Education Center at the University of Ibadan for 26 years. We were involved in very low tech type of training, village health workers. Driving out an hour or two into the bush, and bringing along our own flip charts using locally available materials. Obviously, not having electricity and video. Working with the distance education people, of course this is the exact opposite. We've been [LAUGH] working with very high tech Internet-based and computer-based learning, so it's an interesting contrast. So many of my examples will focus on how we've managed, in low resource context, to conduct training for health workers, continuing education for health workers. So we will have a look at that. Our first lecture is divided into four sections. Section A looks at the definitions of training and organizational issues involved in training. Section B looks at training specifically in the context of organizational management and programming. We have section C that looks at training policy and functions. And finally, section D describes continuing education. As we said, in section A we are concerned about defining the context in which training takes place. You can see that training is part of continuing education, continuing education is required of all health workers. Policies change, procedures change, community needs change. And on a daily basis, if possible, health workers need to be aware of these changes and find ways of updating their needs and their skills. So training, formal training, is one way of doing that. The issue of continuing education is one of the many components of managing human resources or personal management within an organization. And finally, personnel management itself is part of overall organizational management that considers how the organization uses resources to reach its goals. Training itself is a set of formal learning activities. It enables future or current health workers to acquire knowledge, skills, and attitude needed to perform a specific job within the workplace. We are concerned here not with basic education of health workers, basic training, but with in-service education, in-service training, which is part of continuing education. We're also concerned, as I mentioned before, with training of health workers and volunteers, as it affects the delivery of services in the community, as it affects the community's ability to work on itself, its own health problems. So while training does help an organization achieve its goals, by ensuring that health workers have the most up to date skills, it's not just limited to the formal employees of an agency, whether its a health department or an NGO that's delivering health services. So we're concerned also about training community volunteers, peer educators, and outreach workers of various kinds. We know that in any given community, many organizations impact on health. The Health Department can't reach everyone. So people in the health field need to be able to train teachers, agriculture extension workers, and as I mentioned community volunteers. So training is a skill that helps us as health workers reach out, and have a wider effect in the community. As I mentioned, continuing education is broad based, ongoing. Training is one activity within continuing education, which is both formal and informal. Helping health workers skills, things that they learned in their basic nursing, or health inspector training, or medical training, change they need to update this. New innovations come along in the health field, new diagnostic tools, new data collection procedures, and health workers need to update themselves to be able to use these new tools and skills. As we mentioned before, continuing education is part of managing the human resources within an organization. Personnel management is obtaining, and organizing, and motivating the human resources that are required by the organization to achieve its goals, carry out its programs. It's also concerned with developing an organizational climate and management style that will promote effective cooperation, effort, trust among all the people. Issues that affect people's performance, is job satisfaction, remuneration, benefits. So training, again, is one component of this, but management involves many issues and we won't be dealing with all of that. But I want to be sure that we recognize that training does contribute to personnel management. Personnel management also helps organizations meet their legal obligations and social responsibilities. Making sure they do everything, from paying the Social Security taxes for their employees, that they collect unemployment benefits, that they provide medical care to the employees. So again, this is a broader field. The components of personnel management include those activities within an organization that are geared toward recruiting and maintaining a high quality of human resources. Again, an organization can not achieve its goals without employees, and many organizations in the health field without involvement of well trained community volunteers. This workforce needs not only to have the ability and skills to accomplish the goals, carry out the programs of the organization, but also must have the motivation to do their work. Two categories of personnel management that we're concerned about are their conditions of service and job performance. Conditions of service involve a variety of things. Obviously your basic salary scale, your remuneration, the location of the time and work, specifications about how one gets promotions when one's due for promotion. How transfers are handled, how separation from duty is handled. All of these things are spelled out in organizational policies. Performance appraisal, discipline, are part of spelling out how that happens as part of condition of service. Another crucial component is benefits, such as health care, insurance, retirement plans, entitlements, continuing education for yourself, possibly tuition allowances for your children. Part of the condition of service of course is the actual health and safety of the work site, which should be guaranteed to employees. And finally, conditions of service may include such things as allowance for hazard pay, vacations, and other kinds of special activities. A second major component is job performance. And personnel policy should define job descriptions and responsibilities, job qualifications, who can apply. Many of you of course have looked through the American Journal Public Health, or Nation's Health, or other journals, or on the website. And you'll see of course that it says that a person would need a certain degree or a certain number of years working experience. Personnel policy should also define relationships in the work setting, who supervises whom, who reports to whom. And again, job performance includes specification of those activities that would enhance performance such as continuing education, and the process of supervisory evaluations and feedback. The concerns about performance relate more directly to training. Training can influence how an employee carries out his or her job. The other components that we're concerned about in terms of conditions of service, although they will certainly affect morale and performance, are not necessarily subject to amelioration by training. We have a chart that does show the division of concepts within personnel management, human resource management. We can see clearly that conditions of service, including salaries, benefits, discipline, are different than personnel development where we're concerned about improving and maintaining the quality of employee performance, the employees' skills, knowledge, and attitudes toward the work. We need clear job descriptions, as we've mentioned, and in the area that we're going to be focusing on in this course, continuing education. Continuing education has many forms, some of these are seen here. Supervisory visits can be educational, staff meetings, information can be exchanged. Self-learning is important. Are there opportunities and resources available for employees to read? Do they have access to journals? And then in-service training itself, a variety of workshops, seminars, and short courses. So all these are components of continuing education. Again, the focus of the course ultimately is on helping you learn how to develop in service training activities in your organization.
