Tools

The Fundamentals of  Care: Ensuring Quality in Facility-Based Services: A Resource Package
Essential elements for ensuring the quality of facility-based service delivery include: choice, safety, and quality assurance. The ACQUIRE Project has developed a resource package to assist program planners, managers, supervisors, and providers in implementing and evaluating facility-based services according to these fundamentals of care. (2006)
Available as a PDF: download (209KB)

The ACQUIRE Training Model
As part of the overall ACQUIRE Program Model for FP/RH service delivery, the ACQUIRE Model for RH/FP Training is applicable to national, regional, and district-level RH/FP programs, and entails a focus on the centrally important fundamentals of care— informed choice, medical safety, and continuous quality improvement. The Training in RH/FP Model depicts the dynamics of the inputs and activities that contribute to the desired program outputs of stronger training systems and more providers performing to standard, which in turn contribute to achievement of the larger program outcome, and increased availability of quality RH/FP services. (2008)
Available as a PDF: download (154KB)

Programming for Training: A Resource Package for Trainers, Program Managers and Supervisors of Reproductive Health and Family Planning Programs
Training is an essential component of service delivery; it can close gaps in knowledge, skills, and attitudes of RH/FP providers and can help to increase the availability of services. However, while training is often needed to increase the availability and quality of services, it usually cannot accomplish this alone, nor does training by itself necessarily produce more motivated and active service providers. This resource package provides an overall approach to programming for training, as well as information, methods, and tools for designing, developing, planning, implementing, and evaluating training. It also provides tools and information for strengthening training systems. (2008)
Available as a PDF: download (2.6MB)

Integrating Best Practices for Performance Improvement, Quality Improvement, and Participatory Learning and Action to Improve Health Services
This guidance was developed to help staff of the ACQUIRE Project understand and explain to counterparts and field partners the improvement approaches and tools used by ACQUIRE. ACQUIRE brings together partners with proven, effective approaches to improving provider performance and the quality of services and to mobilizing communities to drive improvements in health care: performance improvement (PI), quality improvement (QI), and participatory learning and action (PLA). Although many staff are already familiar with PI, QI, and/or PLA, they do not always recognize the similar purposes of these approaches and how the approaches are related. These approaches and tools can be used alone or in a complementary manner, depending on the situation and on the program level being addressed. (2005)
Available as a PDF: download (481KB)

Facilitative Supervision for Quality Improvement
The concept of facilitative supervision is based on widely accepted quality management principles. It is an approach to supervision that emphasizes mentoring, joint problem solving, and two-way communication between a supervisor and those being supervised. Evidence demonstrates that continuous implementation of facilitative, or supportive, supervision generates sustained performance improvement. This curriculum was developed in response to an expressed need from the field for training materials to develop skills in the facilitative approach to supervision. It is designed to focus on the fundamentals of quality health care services, specifically on medical quality to assure clinical safety and on informed and voluntary decision making. (2008)
The Trainer’s Manual and Participant Handbook are available in modular format.  Please visit: http://www.acquireproject.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ACQUIRE/Facilitative-Supervision/default.htm 

Counseling for Effective Use of Family Planning
The curriculum builds on EngenderHealth’s previous work in counseling, including Comprehensive Counseling for Reproductive Health: An Integrated Curriculum. At the same time, it responds to the identified gap in existing materials and fills the needs expressed by those in the field. The intended audiences for this curriculum are health care providers, their supervisors, and the managers of the programs in which they work. The counseling skills addressed here are expected to be relevant to the provision of both preventive and curative health services through the workshop participants’ national health systems. Finally, the curriculum’s participatory approach to defining terms and to generating profiles of potential clients is designed to assist trainees in addressing the realities and exploring the reproductive health priorities of their communities in a culturally appropriate manner. (2008)
Available as a PDF:
Trainer's Manual -  Part I  (387KB)  Part II (743KB)   Part III (754KB)   Appendixes  (30.8MB)
Participant Handbook  - Text (9.3MB)  Appendixes (9.3MB)