The use of manual job aids by health care providers: what do we know?

This paper describes the use of manual job aids as an innovative intervention to help improve the performance of health care providers. The Quality Assurance Project has focused its attention to this particular intervention because of its suitability for use in the manual and noncomputerized health care settings that are common in the developing world. This concept represents a potentially cost-effective tool to improve the overall process of health care delivery especially by facilitating compliance with health care standards. Moreover this paper reviews literature that summarizes the state of quantitative and qualitative research on different health care provider job aids formats and the impact of these job aids on provider performance. It was found that job aids address some of the causes of the provider noncompliance such as provider forgetfulness lack of time and certain organizational barriers. Lastly health planners and managers working in the developing countries have indicated that manual job aids are ideal for preventive health tasks inexpensive to produce and often reduce or replace the time and expense needed for conducting off-site training.