India

The overall goal of this study was to evaluate whether two tools, developed to build the capacity of health workers globally to respond to their adolescent and young clients effectively and with sensitivity, improved the quality of service provision and experiences of care for reproductive health services to young female clients in two districts in India. [adapted from summary]

This paper aims to address provide a more complete picture of India’s health workforce.

This study examined the attitudes of and inclination to rural healthcare careers among medical students in India. [from abstract]

In rural India, frontline health workers—called accredited social health activists (or ASHAs)—are improving the health of women and families in their own communities by offering key preventive health services. Through the Manthan Project, IntraHealth International is testing a promising multi-media mobile phone application called mSakhi as a tool to make ASHAs’ jobs both easier and more effective. [from author]

To better understand health information needs and barriers across all of levels of the health care system, the authors conducted a needs assessment in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India to examine how health care workers define, obtain, and apply information in the course of their daily work. [adapted from abstract]

This study outlines a detailed analysis of the information needs of village health workers (ASHAs) in India to ascertain information needs, sources, and barriers at different levels of the health system; undertake an in-depth assessment of the health information needs of ASHAs; understand the role and functioning of health care networks; and assess access to and use of ICTs across different levels of the health system. [adapted from summary]

This presentation outlines the status of all level of human resources for health in India and the importance of HRH to service delivery.

This presentation outlines two studies concerning the recruitment and retention of health workers in underserved areas. [adapted from author]

This study focused on the causes of absenteeism among doctors and paramedical staff in primary health care centres in Karnataka and loss of resources due to absenteeism and related issues, with a view to suggest ways and means of reducing absenteeism and maximising impact on the utilisation of public resources. [from summary]

In response the lack of sufficient human resources for health and the skewed geographic availability of medical personnel, the Apollo Hospital Group adopted telemedicine as the most effective way to accellerate the bridging of the demand supply gap without physically shifting resources. This case study examines the network and its processes. [adapted from author]

This case study reports on how the Institute for Rural Health Studies has managed to provide seamless access to healthcare for thousands of people throughout the state of Andhra Pradesh through both rural clinics and its related programs in the city’s bus station connecting to a network of patient counselors in government hospitals. [from author]

This case study highlights the efficiency with which the Community Health and Development (CHAD) program of the Christian Medical College, Vellore has obtained results through a combination of community-based provider training and innovative community service delivery methodologies, as well as discuss how aspects of the model can be adopted by other institutions to achieve similar results. [adapted from author]

The objective of the study defined in this report was to evolve a community-based model of monitoring absenteeism in public health centres that can induce demand accountability of service providers, along with measuring the rate of their absenteeism and the satisfaction of the beneficiaries, and to do evidence-based advocacy for adopting the model and improving the service delivery. [from abstract]

This 8 minute video highlights one solution to the problem of doctor absenteeism being deployed in the Karnataka region in southern India. When patients arrive at a primary health clinic and the doctor is absent, they can use their phones to text a central location which will record this data to allow the government to track and citizens to see which clinics are chronically understaffed. [from publisher]

This paper presents a case study of a multi-component school health promotion intervention in India that was delivered by lay school health counsellors, who possessed neither formal educational nor health provider qualifications. [from abstract]

This paper describes a systematically developed intervention for a lay health worker delivered, community-based intervention for schizophrenia care in three sites in India. [adapted from abstract]

The authors present data from a nationally representative all-India survey which enumerators physically verify the attendance of providers during unannounced visits, and found that nearly 40% of doctors and medical service providers are absent from work on a typical day. [from abstract]

India is facing shortage of qualified mental health manpower. Recognizing this key constraint, the government of India has formulated a manpower development scheme to address the issue. This article outlines the scheme’s primary initatives: centers of excellence in mental health, departments in mental health specialties, upgrading of psychiatric wings of medical colleges, and modernization of state-run mental hospitals. [adapted from abstract]

Community-based rehabilitation (CBR) is a model of care which has been widely used for physical disabilities in resource-poor settings. This study aimed to compare CBR with out-patient care (OPC) for schizophrenia in a resource-poor setting in India to determine if it is a feasible model for treatment in areas without specialized mental health care providers. [adapted from author]

This paper attempts to explore the migration of nurses from India in the context of nursing shortages in the country. It looks at the relationship between the development of the nursing profession in India, shortage of nurses in the country and international migration of Indian nurses. [from introduction]

This article proposes the idea of a new degree course in medicine of a shorter duration to encourage students from rural areas to take up medicine and then provide services in their local areas. [from author]

This article describes the National Rural Health Mission of India and the initiatives undertaken to address the lack of skilled service providers in rural areas including an increase in sanctioned posts for public health facilities, incentives, workforce management policies, locality-specific recruitment and the creation of a new service cadre specifically for public sector employment. [adapted from abstract]

This presentation outlines the successful School of Health Science’s Indira Gandhi National Open University program to democratise higher education; provide cost-effective, quality education to a large section of the population; provide higher education to developing countries; and become a pioneer in distance education for health managers and medical educators. [adapted from author]

The objective of this paper is to identify important aspects of health worker satisfaction and motivation in two Indian states working in public and private sectors. [from abstract]

This qualitative study explores the career preferences of under-training and in-service doctors and nurses and identifies factors important to them to take up rural service. It then develops a framework for clustering these complex attributes into potential incentive packages for better rural recruitment and retention. [from abstract]

This study measures levels of stigma within health care settings in urban and rural Gujarat, in an attempt to understand how this may have contributed to the state’s increasing HIV incidence. [from abstract]

This study proposes methods for measuring inequalities in the distribution of health workers in a country by adapting techniques from the economics literature on income inequality to the measurement of health workforce distribution across geographical units. [from summary]

This study was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of a computerized Health Management Information System (HMIS) in a rural health system in India. [from abstract]

This brief outlines the lessons learned from a 30 year village health improvement project in rural India that integrated community participation and established the value of village health workers.

There is little research on HIV awareness and practices of traditional birth attendants (TBA) in India. This study investigated knowledge and attitudes among rural TBA in Karnataka as part of a project examining how traditional birth attendants could be integrated into prevention-of-mother-to-child transmission of HIV programs in India. [from abstract]