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 manyhave 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.
|
