Background
The Last Ten Kilometer (L10K) project—What it Takes to Improve Health Outcomes in Rural Ethiopia—has been implemented by JSI Research & Training Institute, Inc. (JSI) through funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation since 2007. The project has been striving to improve reproductive, maternal, neonatal, and child health (RMNCH) care behaviors and outcomes in four regions of the country – Amhara, Oromia, Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples (SNNP), and Tigray. The first phase of funding (2007-2015) was focused on supporting 115 woredas and their health facilities in the four regions in the implementation of high impact innovative community-based solutions poised to improve RMNCH care practices and outcomes.
Since 2015, the project was designed to address challenges of the post-Millennium Development Goal (MDG) era related to barriers to achieve maternal, newborn and child mortality targets. However, based on the foundations guidance and need to align with the Ethiopia Integrated Health Program (EIHP), the project has been redesigned through a collaborative process involving experts from Ministry of health (MoH), regional health bureaus (RHBs) and zonal health departments to address systemic challenges by harnessing the project’s comparative advantage areas including community engagement, quality, equity and information use in October 2017. Accordingly, the project has been providing system strengthening support to address the health system challenges at national and regional and zonal levels. The project systems support focuses on increasing the capacity of the health system to (i) implement woreda transformation agenda, (ii) plan, improve and assure quality, (iii) increase equity and (iv) enhance the utilization of valid data to improve RMNCH care practices and outcomes.
The Project has been supporting the Amhara, Oromia, SNNP, and Tigray Regional Health Bureaus (RHBs) to develop the Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health (RMNCH) Centers of Excellence (CoE) to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity by expanding access to efficient, high-quality maternal and child services. The CoE strategy is designed to develop capacity of facilities to mentor other facilities, implement High-Quality Clinical Care (HQCC), and create strong supportive linkages. This could be a sustainable way for the health system to expand quality improvement (QI) efforts of institutionalizing quality culture and produce important systemic changes and would have the potential to reduce the maternal and neonatal deaths in target CoE facilities.
For this purpose, the project is seeking qualitative data collectors to work as consultants.
Required number: 8 (eight)
Place of Work: Finoteselam hospital and Dembecha PHCU of Amhara region; Bishoftu general hospital, Mojo primary hospital, and Biyo PHCU of Oromia region; Lemlem Karl general hospital, Mohoni primary hospital, and Hawelti PHCU of Tigray region; and Worabe comprehensive specialized hospital and Kerate PHCU of SNNP region.
Duration: 14 days
Responsibilities:
· Together with the researcher, develop travel plan and carry out in-depth interviews with hospital staff, health center staff, and health extension workers
· Record conversations and take field notes
· Translate and transcribe from local languages into English
v Degree and above in public health, nurse or any related profession with more than five years of work experience.
v Experience in qualitative surveys (data collection, qualitative data analysis and write up)
v Experience using data to support research efforts and strong levels of data literacy
v Demonstrable ability to write reports or technical materials.
v A clear understanding of the Ethiopian health systems
v Speaking and writing fluency in English and other local languages (Amharic, Oromiffa, and Tigregna)
v Good interpersonal communication skills