Skills-Building for Primary Health System Leaders

Providing technical assistance to strengthen primary healthcare system leaders’ skills in design, systems thinking, and futures thinking in eight states in Nigeria.
The World Bank
Nigeria
2022

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a call to action to rebuild dynamic, people-centred, and equity-enhancing health systems that effectively and sustainably meet changing population needs. In response, the World Bank has developed the Future of Health Systems Programme for Leaders (FHS) that equips health system decision-makers to better understand and manage complex, systemic challenges around health service delivery. The programme seeks to lay the foundation for designing more resilient health systems and achieving the global goals of universal health coverage.

Scope, along with other partners, supported the FHS team with technical assistance to co-design a collaborative, high-impact learning experience for and with 75 senior health system leaders in primary healthcare across eight Nigerian states. The programme complemented the leaders’ technical expertise with human-centred design (HCD) skills and mindsets while tapping into systems and futures thinking to encourage fundamental shifts in thinking and action. We built upon expertise from our Core Nigeria programme, utilising its skills-building model as the base of the learning experience design.

 

Project Approach

Scope worked closely with the World Bank and learning platform-provider TechChange teams to fine-tune elements of the FHS programme to better meet the needs of its participants. We applied a human-centred design approach to build a Data Lab session and platform, drawing from observations and our experience in training public health professionals in design.

The Data Lab supported 75 Nigerian health systems leaders in understanding the factors influencing primary healthcare system performance based on analysis of local data through a human-centred lens and health systems perspective. The insights derived from this analysis guided participants in identifying system and service innovations to pressing problems in primary healthcare system functioning. 

 

Project Outcomes

We facilitated the Data Lab learning model with two Nigeria state health leader cohorts and the FHS team. We then iterated on the learning model based on feedback. The Data Lab model can easily be adapted later to accommodate expansion to additional learning cohorts and countries.

Take our open access, self-paced HCD Basics e-learning course to learn how to apply human-centred design in public healthcare practice.

Back to our work