Title: Effectiveness
Course: Health Management, Ethics and Research - Ethiopia (Full)

Effectiveness

The concept of effectiveness is a measure of how well an organisation, or a person in an organisation, is meeting their goals. For example, if the goal is to provide high quality healthcare and the organisation or person succeeds in doing so, then they are working effectively. If the healthcare provision is poor and people are not satisfied, then the organisation or person is not effective.

The health sector becomes effective when health managers choose the correct goals and then make sure that their health teams can achieve them. Health manager effectiveness involves doing the right things to move the health sector closer to its objectives and at the same time continually learning from that experience. Monitoring and control helps you to measure performance against set objectives and standards and thus assess effectiveness and how well an objective has been achieved. You will learn more about monitoring and control in Study Session 5.

A Health Extension Practitioner is set an objective to distribute 500 malaria bed nets during one year and succeeds in distributing 100 (Figure 2.1). What do you think went wrong?

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There may be many reasons why the objective has not been reached, but this is a failure of management. The Health Extension Practitioner has not been managed effectively, or she would have achieved her objectives.

Figure 2.1 Healthworker distributing bed nets to a rural family. (Photo: FMOH/WT)