Facilitation

The term facilitation is broadly used to describe any activity which makes tasks for others easy. For example:

• Facilitation is used in business and organisational settings to ensure the designing and running of successful meetings.
• Neural facilitation in neuroscience, is the increase in postsynaptic potential evoked by a 2nd impulse.
• Ecological facilitation describes how an organism profits from the presence of another. Examples are nurse plants, which provide shade for new seedlings or saplings (e.g. using an orange tree to provide shade for a newly planted coffee plant), or plants providing shelter from wind chill in arctic environments.
• Public Health facilitationdescribes the use of facilitation as a key process in health-related development sector work , especially at the level of design , planning , and implementation of projects and programs. Public health facilitation has become sine qua non in project development, such that notable public health authorities like Clara Ejembi, Francis Ohanyido and others have considered it as a major element of modern project management. Nigeria like most developing countries is particularly suffering from a dearth of effective facilitators, especially within the myriad of activities going on in the purview of the health sector reform program f the government.

A person who takes on such a role is called a facilitator. Specifically:

• A facilitator is used in a variety of group settings, including business and other organisations to describe someone whose role it is to work with group processes to ensure meetings run well and achieve a high degree of consensus.
• The term facilitator is used in psychotherapy where the role is more to help group members become aware of the feelings they hold for one another (see Group therapy)
• The term facilitator is used in education to refer to a specifically trained adult who sits in class with a disabled, or otherwise needy, student to help them follow the lesson that the teacher is giving (see Disability)
• The term facilitator is used to describe people engaged in the illegal trafficking of human beings across international borders (see Trafficking in human beings).
• The term facilitator is used to describe those individuals who arrange adoptions by attempting to match available children with prospective adopters.
• The term facilitator is used to describe someone who assists people with communication disorders to use communication aids with their hands. See Facilitated communication

Facilitators are a critical new set of key players in today’s global public health domain because of the elements of time-gated delivery of services, program/project deadlines, and diverse operative terrains in which complex projects and programs are implemented. The facilitator in all project scenarios acts to anchor all operational elements so as to ensure that necessary linkages are established so as to achieve their objectives. The facilitator thus enhances the process of a group of people (as few as two) to attain an outcome through shared thinking and work processes for which they will take responsibility. The facilitator in the simplest sense acts as a catalyst, creating the conditions for productive activities to happen. This has become very important in recent years especially in getting governments and communities to "buy-into" donor-funded projects and take up mantle of "ownership" towards the sustainability of such investments.

References

• Facilitation Skills for Public Healthcare Professionals: An Introduction by Francis Ohanyido