CONSULTANCY - TERMS OF REFERENCE

UNRWA is a United Nations agency established by the General Assembly in 1949 and is mandated to provide assistance and protection to a population of some 5 million registered Palestine refugees. Its mission is to help Palestine refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, West Bank and the Gaza Strip to achieve their full potential in human development, pending a just solution to their plight. UNRWA’s services encompass education, health care, relief and social services, camp infrastructure and improvement, microfinance and emergency assistance. UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions. UNRWA is the largest UN operation in the Middle East with more than 30,000 staff.

Health System Evaluator(The E-health Project Evaluation), HQ Amman

BACKGROUND

UNRWA’s Department of Internal Oversight Services (DIOS) is planning an evaluation of the e-health project evaluation, which will be managed by the Evaluation Division in DIOS. It will be carried out by external consultants. The evaluation will draw conclusions independently without any interference from management, especially regarding analysis and recommendations.

Description of Duties and Responsibilities

The role of the Health System Evaluatorwill be to contribute answers to the evaluation questions mentioned in Annex 1, in particular question 1,3 and 5 under relevance,question 4 under efficiency, questions 1 and 2 under effectiveness, question 2,3 and 5 under impact and question 3 under sustainability.

The Evaluator will carry out the following duties:

  1. Reviewing relevant programme documentation (3 consultant days);
  2. Contribute to developing the Evaluation Methodology, qualitative and quantitative research tools (2 consultant days);
  3. Informationcollection (23 consultant days) by
  4. Carrying out site visits to UNRWA Field offices and its Health Centres;
  5. Assessing plans and documentation materials that are available in UNRWA’s offices and Health Centres;
  6. Carrying out semi-structured interviews and focus groups with stakeholders across the Fields.
  7. Communicating the preliminary findings to the other members of the evaluation team as part of a daily debriefing (consultant days included in the above);
  8. Providing input into the drafting of the inception, draft and final report(6 consultant days);
  9. Contributing to presenting the preliminary findings in the debriefing (1 consultant day).

Essential Qualifications and Experience

  • Advanced university degree from an accredited educational institution in medicine or related subject;
  • A minimum of 10 years of work experience;
  • Experience in Medical Health Records or e-Health system;
  • Strong analytical skills;
  • Fluency in English.

DESIRABLE QUALIFICATIONS

  • Previous work experience in the Middle East;
  • Previous work experience with UN agencies;
  • Arabic Language skills.

CONDITIONS OF SERVICE

  • The expected start date of the evaluation field work is 1 April 2015;
  • The duration of the assignment is35 consultant days;
  • The Health System Evaluator of the evaluation must be able to travel to UNRWA’s Fields of operation, namely Jordan, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank (including Jerusalem).

APPLICATION PROCESS

Applicants should submit a cover letter, list of similar assignments and a CV or UN Personnel History Form, as well as their expected daily consultant rate via clearly indicating the title of this consultancy as “Health System Evaluator” in the subject line of the message. CVs should contain the contact details of a minimum of three references. The deadline for the submission of applications is 10 March 2015.

UNRWA is an equal opportunity employer and welcomes applications from both women and men. UNRWA encourages applications from qualified and experienced female candidates. Only those applicants short-listed for interview will be contacted. UNRWA is a non-smoking environment.

ANNEX 1: THE E-HEALTH PROJECT EVALUATION

The Health Department believes that the e-health project is essential because of its support for the implementation of the Family Health Team approach in addition to its role in supporting the Health Department as a whole. The e-health project in UNRWA has three outputs (1) the capacity building package; (2) the e-health adoption component; (3) the e-health system development.

The evaluation will contribute to accountability and learning. It aims to attribute the e-health contributions to the achievement of the overall health services (quality and efficiency improvement and supporting Family Health Team approach). The evaluation will provide advice to the Health Department to improve the e-health project implemented, prior to roll out to the remaining health centres. It will identify good practice in relation to e-health projects.

The evaluation will cover all Fields of UNRWA operations, if accessible, and look at all aspects of the e-health project including previous stages of development. The evaluation will include a sample of health centres that have adopted the e-health system fully or partially and health centres that still follow the paper based system (for comparison). In addition, the evaluation will assess good practices in e-health systems design and the linkage to other systems used in the region (AviCenna and Hakeem host government e-health systems in Jordan and oPt). The evaluation will include a review lessons learnt from roll out, designing, planning, implementation and change management process.

It will cover all evaluation domains; Relevance, Efficiency, Effectiveness, Impact and Sustainability.

Relevance

This evaluation will focus on the relevance of e-health project towards improving the quality and efficiency of health service provision and of the e-health project supporting the Family Health Team approach.

Suggested Evaluation questions include:

  1. To what extent did the e-health project contribute to improving health service provision to Palestine refugees in health centres and overall to the health service provision in the region?
  2. To what extent the e-health system was integrated into UNRWA information systems, and contributed to change management in UNRWA?
  3. To what extent did the e-health project adapt to the change of approach resulting from the health reform and in particular the adoption of the Family Health Team approach.
  4. To what extent was information about governments’ e-health systems taken into account when designing the e-health project?
  5. Was the e-health project design adequate, in particular were the e-health project stakeholders consulted adequately, was the intervention logic well developed and was the governance and support to the project adequate?
  6. Did the e-health project take account of the particular needs of female staff?

Efficiency

The e-health project is evaluated as efficient if it uses resources appropriately and produces the desired outputs. The evaluation will assess the efficiency of the e-health approach in comparison with the paper based system, as well as the processes to implement e-health.

Suggested evaluation questions include:

  1. How does the total system cost of e-health system compare with other relevant systems?
  2. To what extent has the e-health project implementation been efficient in terms of achieving the time line, using existing space, coordination, staffing and cost?
  3. To what extent has the e-health project revision process been efficient in reflecting the change of approach resulting from the health reform and in particular the adoption of the family health team approach?
  4. To what extent does the e-health project contribute to efficiency gains in terms of data collection, use of resources (paper, etc.), and health centre management?

Effectiveness

It will aim to identify what elements of the e-health project were provided a desired result.

The suggested questions that will be used to assess the effectiveness include:

  1. To what extent has the e-health project been able to support the Family Health Team approach to improve the quality and efficiency of health service provided?
  2. To what extent has the e-health project achieved its objectives of improving patient compliance, and collected comprehensive, accurate and timely information from UNRWA health centres?
  3. How has the e-health project contributed to how UNRWA gathers data?

Impact

Impact measures contribution of e-health towards improved service quality in health centres to Palestine refugees.

Suggested evaluation questions include:

  1. Is the e-health system providing information that feeds into the decision making process in UNRWA at all levels?
  2. Does the e-health project, improve the performance of the work in health centres?
  3. To what extent is this contributing to overall health service provision in the host countries?
  4. To what extent is the data disaggregated and the information prepared to provide a better understanding of gender and other cross-cutting issues?
  5. Assess whether is the unintended impact (positive or negative)?

Sustainability

Sustainability measures the extent to which the benefits of adopting the e-health will continue in the long term.

Suggested Evaluation questions include:

  1. Are the recurrent costs of the e-health implementation higher than before or lower, and are resources available to run the system in the medium term?
  2. Are the resources available to maintain the e-health (security, backup, training, support, etc…)?
  3. To what extent is the e-health able to respond to changing and emerging health priorities and needs?

1