Human resources policies and capacity development

Materializing Expanded PHI needs a new breed of HR professional. To build this, policy support is required in many areas such as curriculum, institutions, testing, and certification. These need to cover a wider spectrum of skill sets including IT, statistics, big data analytics, and various others. Some specific measures in this regard include:

i) Curriculum redesign in colleges of medicine, community health, and in nursing schools to include modules in public health informatics. Help create formal collaboration between informatics and public health departments and schools and universities to have more comprehensive courses in public health informatics.

ii) Improve and standardize in-service training courses for different cadres of health staff.

iii) Support the development of Master’s programmes on public health informatics as an institutional base for wider educational programmes.

iv) Help establish centres and networks of excellence in areas of cutting-edge knowledge areas such as big data analytics, which could:

a.Promote the use of best practice design approaches, such as web-based data warehousing and ‘cloud’ server hosting.

b. Provide technical and capacity support to units in the design, development, and implementation of software systems and processes.

c. Promote the use of standard open source software in line with global best practices.

d. Create and disseminate technical resources such as standards, user manuals, software use guides, and other resources.

e. Identify other institutions, such as universities and research centres, to provide technical capacities to their students customized to the country’s requirements.

f. Help create mechanisms for mutual knowledge transfer across and within countries.