Health Systems in Action: an eHandbook for Leaders and Managers

Preface
the creators of this handbook have been listening carefully to people like you for
many years. You have told us that you wished you had been better prepared to
manage and lead health facilities or programs and health care providers. You
spoke to us about your commitment to health as a human right and your struggles to
ensure that your health facilities and staff produce high-quality health services for people
in need. We heard your descriptions of the challenges of working under less-than-ideal
circumstances and always in the face of significant resource constraints.
Health Systems in Action: An eHandbook for Leaders and Managers was written for you.
We hope it will help you lead and manage your team or unit, program, or organization to
realize the dream you set out to accomplish: universal access for individuals, families, and
communities to the best possible health care.
We believe the following pages will provide insights and tools that will help you manage
and lead better and enable others to face challenges and produce desired results. We want
to help you reach your goals by improving the responsiveness of the health system or your
specific organization to the needs of clients, staff, and others who have a stake in quality
health care.
The topic of effective health systems is on everyone’s mind these days. Much is known
about the elements of a health system, and many frameworks exist. Yet there is still a
major gap related to the “how” of making health systems work.
This handbook brings together effective practices in leadership, management, and governance
from decades of our worldwide field experience in public health. It includes effective
practices in key management systems that all work together to improve health. In
addition, it draws on the practical approaches for leading and managing available to you
in Managers Who Lead: A Handbook for Improving Health Services, which was published
in 2005 and reprinted in 2009.
Our aim is to give you a comprehensive, practical guide and a set of tools and resources
that address common issues in leading and managing health services. We have designed
this handbook as an electronic resource that you can access with ease on the Internet and
read online, print, and download. This handbook is also available on CD-ROM.
www.msh.org/resource-center/health-systems-in-action.cfm HeAltH SySteMS In ACtIon
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