Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) Method for Midwives Planning and Estimation at Asrade Zewude Memorial Primary Hospital, North west Ethiopia

Abstract

Background Work force is a crucial component of health services delivery system. Ethiopia faces health workforce challenges with regard to evidence based health work force planning. First the health worker to population ratio was used and later standard staffing schedule for each health facility level was used. Both of these methods did not address the issue of evidence based workload variation between the same levels of facilities at different locations within a country. A workload indicator of staffing need method (WISN) addresses these variations. Therefore this study was assumed for recommendation on use of WISN for health facilities based on WISN results of midwives at Asrade Zewude memorial Hospital. Methods Cross sectional study using WISN model was used to determine the gaps or excess and workload pressure in midwives at Asrade Zewude Memorial primary hospital, North West Ethiopia. Results The finding showed that there was five working days with 1030 hrs actual working time per year for midwives. This working time was spent on health service activities (58.4%), additional activities (36.6%) and support activities (5%). WISN calculation showed that a shortage of five midwives with WISN ratio of 0.8 at Asrade Zewude Memorial primary hospital North West Ethiopia. Conclusion Midwives at the study area were doing their routine work with 20% under staffed by covering the additional five midwives' position. With this working condition, it may be hard to achieve universal health coverage goals of the facility. Therefore the hospital should institutionalize WISN method to objectively employ midwifery professionals.

Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) Method for Health Workforce Planning at Health Facility: A scoping review

“…Implications of WISN method during workforce planning A workload indicator of sta ng need (WISN) is a human resource management tool that has signi cance advantage to different stakeholders over the previous planning modalities. Human resource planners use WISN for evidence based estimation of health work force [27]. Health authorities can use WISN model to adjust or develop new sta ng norms and objectively inform their demand to academic institutions.…”

“…Health workforce planning using WISN method has challenges too. Main challenges identi ed with this scoping review were grouped as data availability and quality issues [27,28,40,43] (lack of properly documented health service performance data, poor quality health service activity data and several data sources for single information), activity standard issues [33,38,43] (multi-tasking nature of non-clinical staff which has detrimental effect on task performance, activity standards cannot be adopted or adapted from one country to another as the context varies from one country to another country, wide spread task shifting and unavailability of standard workload for some health worker categories ) and technical issues [40,43](The technical task forces need training in each step of the WISN method, WISN method needs laborious data entry and setting activity standards need detail activity).…”