Training Information Monitoring System
The Training Information Monitoring System
(TIMS©) is a Microsoft Access™ database application used to
track and monitor training. Jhpiego has facilitated the use of TIMS for training
programs in 15 countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
In TIMS, each person’s skills, qualifications and current facility
are stored, along with courses taken, courses taught and competencies achieved and
maintained. In the standard form, TIMS tracks the following training results over
time:
- How many courses (by training center, district
or province) have been held?
- Which courses have been held on a specific topic in a given
timeframe, who sponsored them and how many people attended each?
- How many course participants is each funding agency or
award providing training?
- In what types of health facilities do trained health care
professionals work?
- What levels of clinical and training skill competency have
participants attained?
- Are providers attending complementary or duplicate
courses?
- How many trainers of each rank or type has a program
trained?
- Which trainers have been conducting courses and how many
have they trained?
- For trainers who have been developed, when were their
skills last assessed and are they currently active as trainers?
- Which course participants have received a follow-up
assessment of their skills?
- What are the results of training
follow-up visits to a
specific course participant?
TIMS allows senior and mid-level program managers to monitor
a range of training activities and track results from a variety of perspectives. TIMS
is designed to be part of an organization’s training information system, replacing
paper-based reporting and aggregation with a computer database. Ministries of
health, national training programs and nongovernmental organizations
can use TIMS
to supplement service information for policy decisions on training, retraining and
provider deployment.
How Does TIMS Work?
Information defining a course—where and when held, description of
course content, types of skills transferred—is entered into the TIMS database by users
or by a database administrator. This administrator has the capability to edit data
lookup tables, control user access and view audit history on every record in the
database. Information that can be entered about course participants at the time of
training includes personal data, occupation, qualification, which services they
provide and results of any knowledge and skill assessments. Information about the
participant’s facility is collected, and TIMS supports documentation of
follow-up
visits at the health care provider’s work site. TIMS also offers more than 10
customizable fields to meet program needs.
More than 60 standard monitoring reports can be generated from TIMS.
Training profiles and transcripts for individuals include which courses were taken as
well as provided by a given trainer, in addition to clinical competencies and training
skills attained. Information on who was trained in various skills in a given year and
which courses have been offered at a given training center is readily available.
Deployment of trained staff can also be viewed by geographical region and health care
facility. Users with advanced database skills can build additional reports into TIMS.
With fields for health care facility identification numbers as well as
individual and provider identification codes, TIMS data files can be linked with other
data sources such as government service delivery databases, human resource information
systems and geographic information systems (GIS), giving the flexibility to use TIMS
data beyond training monitoring.
More Information
For more information about TIMS and/or other monitoring and evaluation
activities, contact us.
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