MAQ Publishes QAP Paper on Supportive Supervision

The U.S. Agency for International Development’s Maximizing Access and Quality (MAQ) Initiative recently published a new synthesis paper entitled Making Supervision Supportive and Sustainable: New Approaches to Old Problems. The paper was written by QAP’s Lani Marquez, Acting Communication Director, and consultant Linda Kean. It was commissioned by the MAQ Monitoring and Supervision Subcommittee, in which QAP is an active participant.

The paper draws on the experiences of leading USAID cooperating agencies with approaches to supervision of healthcare workers that emphasize joint problem-solving, mentoring, teamwork, and communication between supervisors and those being supervised. Also known as facilitative supervision, supportive supervision incorporates a broader range of techniques to monitor and improve health worker performance, such as self-assessment, peer assessment, and community input. Program experiences implementing supportive supervision have found that effectively implementing this approach requires new thinking about who does supervision and how and when it occurs, motivation of supervisors and staff to adopt new behaviors, locally appropriate and tested tools, commitment of top management, and integration into existing human resource management systems.

 The publication was edited and produced for the MAQ Initiative by the Management and Leadership Program of Management Sciences for Health. Making Supervision Supportive and Sustainable can be accessed online at http://www.maqweb.org/maqdoc/MAQno4final.pdf.

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