Archives - Page 12

  • Public Health Administration
    No. 12 (1987)

    The Central American region is going through a social, economic and political crisis of considerable magnitude.

    The international context of ideological and economic struggle largely conditions this crisis. On the other hand, the domestic scenario, characterized by limitations in the effectiveness and efficiency of the services provided by State institutions, has exacerbated the situation to extremes that seem very difficult to overcome.

    The health sector is no stranger to the consequences of the convulsive situation in the isthmus, and thus we find a series of unsatisfactory indicators.

    In some countries, life expectancy at birth does not reach 60 years, and infant mortality exceeds 80 deaths per thousand live births. Diseases of infectious origin coexist with those of chronic and degenerative evolution.

    Within the above panorama, the population is growing rapidly, without the State being able to give an adequate response to the demands that this situation provokes. Added to this is a new social problem: massive migration within and between countries, caused mainly by the armed conflicts affecting some of the Central American nations.

    The historical challenge that this situation poses for public administrations deserves to be addressed as a matter of priority and with concrete and adequate responses to the reality facing the region. Guided by this line of thought and aware of the mandate of the governments it represents, the Central American Institute of Public Administration, as part of its training programs, initiated in September 1986 a Postgraduate Program in Public Administration with emphasis on Health Administration. Likewise, within this strategy oriented to support the Public Health Sector in Central America, training, advisory and research programs have been initiated. In this issue of the Central American Journal of Public Administration, dedicated to the topic of Health Administration, we outline some questions and proposals to focus attention on the complex health problems of the Central American population. Thus, we want to emphasize initially the need for Central America to find its own concepts, design its own definitions and participate fully in the improvement of its health status from a global perspective and with an integral approach.

     

  • Information Systems Management
    No. 11 (1986)

    Information is a vital resource for the planning and execution of all aspects of public sector policy. From this perspective, public sector institutions must collect, process and disseminate better information if they are to manage their programs more effectively and efficiently.

    A problem in increasing efficiency and productivity in public sector institutions is the inadequate development of systems to collect data, organize it, and produce the information needed to make and execute decisions. In addition, there is a lack of knowledge about the information requirements that institutions have in order to execute their policies.

    Information is essential for the planning of public programs, which are crucial for the development of a country and for obtaining greater self-sufficiency. However, the availability of information is not always known, and access to it is not necessarily easy. Information is often out of date and its authenticity can be questioned. If we add to this the fact that what information is available on the different activities of society is generally incomplete and therefore of limited value for analytical purposes, the picture is not very rosy.

    A suitable way for public institutions to increase their effectiveness is to develop a knowledge base of the information needed to carry out their policies. The analysis of these requirements can serve as a basis for the planning and operation of systems and networks that provide essential information for public policy decision-making.

    Likewise, it should not be forgotten that scientific and technical information is a key element for development and that it is up to us to work so that this knowledge base exists and improves day by day.

     

  • Project Management
    No. 10 (1986)

    Project Management

    This edition is dedicated to the subject of projects, as it is considered to be of current importance and extremely useful in the implementation of governmental plans and programs in favor of the development of countries.

    Project management is important because it is a powerful tool that, when properly used, increases and allows measuring the efficiency and effectiveness of investments in the public sector.

    All stages of the project life cycle can be managed using the technical tools that have been developed.

    The principles of project formulation, evaluation and management and basic techniques, when properly applied, can be adapted to projects of different nature and magnitude, but their potential is closely linked to the possibility of analysis and the inclusion of the project management group's own conditions.

    Project management comprises the following five stages to achieve efficient and effective management.

    The first is the exact definition of the project's objectives, both in the execution and operation stages.

    The second is project planning, a qualitative stage in which the course of action for achieving the objectives is established, obtaining an orderly list of the tasks to be performed to achieve them.

    The third stage is the programming stage, in which resources are allocated to the planned activities.

    The fourth stage should define the role that each existing or ad-hoc organization will play in the implementation of the project planning and programming. The assigned human resources will be departmentalized in a certain way, adapting to the functional structures involved or creating new structures.

    Finally, the information and control system should establish how the project's progress will be measured, in order to detect deviations, forecast, make management decisions and prepare realistic reports.

  • Training in public administration
    No. 9 (1985)

    Professional training in public administration has become one of the efforts in the field of human resources that should be undertaken in Central America with greater commitment and vision for the future. This need is more palpable at the higher levels of public service, due both to the greater knowledge and skills demanded by the growing complexity and technification of the state administrative apparatus, and to the greater degree of participation of officials at those levels in the formulation and implementation of government policies and programs.

    This need is heightened by more complex issues arising from the current situation, which pose greater challenges to the administrative apparatus in terms of its capacity for timely and effective response to the complex economic and social problems it must solve. These problems cannot and should not be faced in an improvised manner; they must have the technical-administrative knowledge and management skills to find and implement the appropriate measures to solve them.

    Suffice it to mention in this regard, the need to efficiently manage a growing volume of governmental tasks under the impact of an acute economic crisis, which leads to the reduction of public expenditure: as well as the need to introduce in bureaucratic processes and behaviors the changes required by the advancement and strengthening of democratization processes, in pursuit of a fairer and more balanced development.

    Public administrators must be equipped not only with greater technical knowledge and managerial skills, but also with a broader understanding of the nature and implications of the various problems affecting society, so that they acquire the necessary sensitivity to understand the social significance of the performance of their responsibilities, in the light of the government's commitment to provide solutions to problems.

    Therefore, it is not only an effort to increase the number of civil servants with professional training in public administration. There is also an aspect of the quality of the professional who must be trained to be able to face not only the technical issues of public administration, but also the conflictive challenge of finding adequate solutions to the substantive problems that the administrative apparatus must attack, particularly those that have the greatest impact on the deterioration of the living conditions of large sectors of the population.

    It is then about the formation of a public administrator with the knowledge, skills and qualities demanded by the political, social and economic progress of Central American societies.

     

  • Human resources management
    No. 8 (1985)

    The public service as an institution is the part of the community that specializes in the execution of policies for the achievement of public objectives. To this end, the human element constitutes the essential resource and its management influences and conditions the character of the public service.

    Despite its importance, human resources management, as a field of functional specialization, is relatively new. It emerged as personnel administration and its beginnings date back to just before the First World War. In its development, the field of human resources and personnel has relied heavily on the contributions of other disciplines, most notably the contributions of the social sciences, especially psychology and economics, which have greatly influenced human resources management.

    The current circumstances of the work process and the complexity of public agencies demand from human resources management the integration of these to the organization in which they work, combining the progress of the institution towards its objectives and the realization of the social function, with the quality and efficiency of the personnel. This management requires the creation of an adequate and stimulating organizational climate within the organization, factors that go beyond the traditional activities of Personnel Administration.

    Efforts to integrate personnel in an organization are made from different angles and with different objectives, however in all of them a common denominator appears: the convergence between the institutional objectives and the work of qualified personnel for each of the functions; the assignment of this personnel must be flexible, that is to say that it can advance with the socioeconomic dynamics that sooner or later drags the organizations towards changes.

    Thus, many changes have occurred in the climate in which the human resources management function operates. These changes, together with the development of the corresponding theories and techniques, have modified the structure and qualification of personnel in human resources units. In an effort in this sense, the State has increasingly intervened to reform civil service regimes in order to increase productivity through training and education programs. On the other hand, the human resources management process has undergone some variations, such as the sharing of personnel functions between substantive units and personnel units, allowing the former to operate more independently.

    Despite these efforts, the problems affecting human resources management have not been overcome and the personnel "crisis" consumes too much of management's time; too often personnel management is concerned almost exclusively with the strict supervision of employees' activities, neglecting the establishment of conditions under which maximum self-direction can be acquired. 

    It is in this sense of self-direction that human resource management calls for the integration of personnel under different perspectives: a) promoting conditions that contribute to trust in human resources, b) generating the participation of personnel in tasks of identification and/or definition of public policies; c) articulating jointly with those responsible for mobilizing and integrating the work process tasks, the execution and solution of personnel problems; d) stimulating creative thinkers within the organization; e) planning in terms of existing public policies and executed and evaluated action f) stimulating the generation of viable proposals that allow arriving at decisions of public interest. These are some of the challenges of human resources management to meet future needs.

     

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