Mission, Vision and Strategy
Sustainable Management Development Program
The Sustainable Management Development Program (SMDP) partners with ministries of health, educational institutions, and nongovernmental organizations in developing countries to promote organizational excellence in public health through strengthening leadership and management capacity. SMDP’s goal is to improve the effectiveness of the public health sector in developing countries by
- Empowering local health officials with better leadership, management, and decision-making skills; and
- Stimulating creativity and innovation among local health personnel to improve the delivery of public health services.
SMDP works with partners to build capacity for public health leadership and management development through a multi-phased approach:
Strategic Partnerships
Develop strategic institutional partnerships for public health leadership and management capacity-building efforts. With partners, identify priority public health target audiences from national to sub-national levels for leadership and management development. Analyze organizational leadership and management skills and performance gaps. Work with stakeholders and counterpart institutions to create an action plan for capacity development that includes a budget, timeline, and measurable outcomes.
Capacity Development
Develop faculty to enhance in-country leadership and management training capacity through the Management for International Public Health (MIPH) course and in-country training-of-trainers courses. Train faculty in a broad variety of public health leadership and management skills and innovative training techniques. Provide fully developed public health leadership and management competency frameworks and curricula for use and adaptation in diverse global public health settings.
Technical Assistance
Provide support to training faculty in partner institutions to conduct performance needs assessments, develop locally appropriate curricula, and design in-country leadership and management workshops that provide participants with practical skills needed to manage public health teams, programs, and organizations. Promote the use of applied management improvement projects that stimulate workshop participants to apply the new skills in their work settings immediately. Work with faculty to support and mentor teams implementing applied management improvement projects and to measure the impact on organizational performance.
Sustainability
Work with partner institutions to ensure the long-term sustainability of global public health leadership and management development programs and address issues such as integration with national public health priorities, local funding for recurrent costs, continuous learning opportunities, accreditation, and evaluating impact.
Guiding Principles
- Emphasize applied leadership and management skills, not just theoretical knowledge.
- Train in a highly interactive manner and draw upon participants’ personal experience to reinforce team learning.
- Incorporate public health examples to illustrate the use of management tools that may originally have been developed for industry or other sectors; ensure that examples are relevant for developing-country audiences.
- Provide facilitators’ guides, practical aids, and tools that facilitate teaching the materials to others.
- Emphasize evidence-based decision-making in public health management.
- Use applied management improvement projects to reinforce classroom learning, multiply training benefits, and generate products that have a measurable impact on public health program goals.
- Provide post-course technical assistance to support the development of sustainable management development programs.
- Solicit feedback through a variety of means (e.g., questionnaires, focus groups, external evaluations) and continuously strive to improve the content as well as the learning process.
- Provide post-training incentives to stimulate lifelong learning, such as website access, regional networking among alumni, conferences, fellowships, and career development opportunities.