Deployment
Chances for Change: Dutch Measures to Improve the Global Distribution of Health Personnel
This publication presents measures composed by the Dutch Alliance for Human Resources for Health, a group concerned about the global maldistribution of human resources for health, to be taken by Dutch actors to improve the distribution of health staff across countries. [from preface]
- 1203 reads
Reducing Geographical Imbalances of Health Workers in Sub-Saharan Africa: a Labor Market Perspective on What Works, What Does Not, and Why
This report discusses and analyzes labor market dynamics and outcomes (including unemployment, worker shortages, and urban-rural imbalances of categories of health workers) from a labor economics perspective to address undesirable outcomes (including urban-rural HRH imbalances) more effectively. [adapted from summary]
- 1998 reads
Mandatory Rural Service for Health Care Workers in Thailand
This article discusses Thailand’s mandatory health service system. Under this system, all early-career health workers from public professional schools serve in rural areas as a governmental worker to maintain the rural health workforce. The system has ameliorated the shortage of physicians in rural areas by substantially decreasing the emigration of Thai physicians to foreign countries.
- 1963 reads
Technical Framework for Costing Health Workforce Retention Schemes in Remote and Rural Areas
This paper reviews the evidence on costing interventions to improve health workforce recruitment and retention in remote and rural areas, provides guidance to undertake a costing evaluation of such interventions and investigates the role and importance of costing to inform the broader assessment of how to improve health workforce planning and management. [from abstract]
- 1575 reads
Educational Factors that Influence the Urban-Rural Distribution of Health Professionals in South Africa: a Case-Control Study
This study aimed to evaluate the influence of educational factors on the choice of rural or urban sites of practice of health professionals in South Africa. [from abstract]
- 1994 reads
Attraction and Retention of Qualified Health Workers to Rural Areas in Nigeria: a Case Study of Four LGAs in Ogun State, Nigeria
This study aimed to determine factors that will attract and retain rural and urban health workers to rural Nigerian communities, and to examine differences between the two groups. [from abstract]
- 2409 reads
Human Resources for Health in Southeast Asia: Shortages, Distributional Challenges, and International Trade in Health Services
This article considers the shortage and maldistribution of health personnel in countries in southeast Asia in the context of international trade in health services. It analyzes the situation and identifies factors contributing to shortages and maldistribution in many countries in the region. The effect of trade in health services on the health workforce is discussed. [from introduction]
- 2871 reads
Influence of Loan Repayment on Rural Healthcare Provider Recruitment and Retention in Colorodo
The objective of this study was to assess the influence of loan repayment and other factors on the recruitment and retention of healthcare providers in rural Colorado, USA, and to compare the motivations and attitudes of these rural providers with their urban counterparts. [from introduction]
- 1971 reads
Indian Approaches to Retaining Skilled Health Workers in Rural Areas
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]
- 1951 reads
Addressing Issues of Maldistribution of Health Care Workers
This article describes a program directed at the re-supply of rural physicians in rural areas and its success in addressing the critical shortages caused by maldistribution of health care workers. [adapated from abstract]
- 3178 reads
Attracting and Retaining Health Workers in Rural Areas: Investigating Nurses' Views on Rural Posts and Policy Interventions
Kenya has bold plans for scaling up priority interventions nationwide, but faces major human resource challenges, with a lack of skilled workers especially in the most disadvantaged rural areas. This study investigated reasons for poor recruitment and retention in rural areas and potential policy interventions through quantitative and qualitative data collection with nursing trainees. [adapted from abstract]
- 2449 reads
Do Ugandan Medical Students Intend to Work in Rural Health Facilities after Training?
Several training institutions have engaged in programs to expose pre-service health workers to rural health work to demystify it and to enable the professionals make an informed choice on practice location after qualification. In this study, the intentions of Ugandan medical students to work in rural health facilities after qualification were sounded out, together with the factors that affect them and their perception of rural areas. [from abstract]
- 1439 reads
Health Worker Attitudes Toward Rural Service in India: Results from Qualitative Research
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]
- 1636 reads
How Can General Practitioners Establish 'Place Attachement' in Australia's Northern Territory? Adjustment Trumps Adaptation
Retention of GPs in the more remote parts of Australia remains an important issue in workforce planning. The Northern Territory of Australia experiences very high rates of staff turnover. This research examined how the process of forming place attachment between GP and practice location might influence prospects for retention. [from abstract]
- 1362 reads
Challenges to the Student Nurse on Clinical Placement in the Rural Setting: a Review of the Literature
Positive learning experiences for students on clinical placement in rural settings have the potential for supporting the recruitment of qualified nurses to these areas. Recruitment of such nurses is a global concern because current shortages have resulted in decreased healthcare quality for rural residents. By understanding the challenges faced by nursing students unfamiliar with rural settings, educational and organizational strategies can be developed to promote positive learning experiences and so enhance recruitment.
- 2755 reads
Measuring Health Workforce Inequalities: Methods and Application to China and India
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]
- 4546 reads
Exploring Health Workforce Inequalities: Case Studies from Three Countries
With the aim of arriving at a better understanding of specific dimensions of health workforce inequalities in their national contexts, three case studies are presented from Ethiopia, Brazil and Mexico. [from introduction]
- 1879 reads
Postgraduate Training at the Ends of the Earth: a Way to Retain Physicians?
Recruitment and retention of qualified health professionals, especially physicians, is a major challenge in health service delivery in the high north, similar to other remote areas of the world. This article describes a strategy to address this problem and evaluates the effect of the strategy for Finnmark, the northernmost county of Norway. [from abstract]
- 1455 reads
Impact Evaluation of a Young Medical Volunteers Project for Vietnam Rural Mountain
This study evaluates the health impacts of a volunteer intervention addressing health worker shortage in remote mountainous communities of Vietnam. [from abstract]
- 2026 reads
Increasing Access to Health Workers in Remote and Rural Areas through Improved Retention: Global Policy Recommendations
After a year-long consultative effort, this document proposes sixteen evidence-based recommendations on how to improve the recruitment and retention of health workers in underserved areas. It also offers a guide for policy makers to choose the most appropriate interventions, and to implement, monitor and evaluate their impact over time. [from publisher]
- 2454 reads
Model Linking Clinical Workforce Skill Mix Planning to Health and Health Care Dynamics
This paper presents a structural map of a health system based on a synthesis of a needs-based analytic framework and a supply side framework, showing the interactive connections between its major components, which could be expanded at a later date to show the linkages between the tasks performed by a health workforce and the cadres of personnel that could supply those tasks. [adapted from author]
- 1902 reads
Analysis of a Survey on Young Doctors' Willingness to Work in Rural Hungary
There is not only a lack of human resources for health in Hungary, but significant inequalities are widespread, including in geographical distribution. This report, based on research carried out in 2008, deals with the willingness of young doctors to work outside Budapest. [adapted from abstract]
- 1294 reads
Emerging Opportunities for Recruiting and Retaining a Rural Health Workforce through Decentralized Health Financing Systems
This paper looks at the potential for decentralization to lead to better health workforce recruitment, performance and retention in rural areas through the creation of additional revenue for the health sector; better use of existing financial resources; and creation of financial incentives for health workers. [from introduction]
- 8871 reads
How Can Medical Schools Contribute to the Education, Recruitment and Retention of Rural Physicians in Their Region?
Developing a sufficient and sustainable rural physician workforce requires commitment and cooperation from communities, governments and medical schools. The author argues that medical education can play an important role in the recruitment and retention of rural physicians. [adapted from author]
- 1745 reads
How to Recruit and Retain Health Workers in Underserved Areas: the Senegalese Experience
This article outlines the introduction of a special contracting system to recruit health workers to improve the posting, recruitment and retention of health workers in rural and remote areas. [adapted from abstract]
- 2688 reads
Evaluated Strategies to Increase Attraction and Retention of Health Workers in Remote and Rural Areas
This paper builds on earlier work assessing the evidence on effectiveness of interventions to increase access to health workers in rural and remote areas - focusing mainly on studies that evaluated interventions and their impact on the health workforce and health systems performance. [adapted from introduction]
- 2864 reads
Chilean Rural Practitioner Programme: A Multidimensional Strategy to Attract and Retain Doctors in Rural Areas
This paper explores a long-standing strategy to attract and retain doctors in rural areas in Chile: the Rural Practitioner Programme. The objectives of the study are to describe this programme for rural doctors (médicos generales de zona), to characterize its multidimensional set of incentives and to carry out a preliminary evaluation of programme outcomes. [from introduction]
- 2188 reads
Compulsory Service Programmes for Recruiting Health Workers in Remote and Rural Areas: Do They Work?
This study compiled information on the numbers and types of health worker compulsory service programs in WHO countries.
- 2211 reads
Policy Interventions that Attract Nurses to Rural Areas: a Multicountry Discrete Choice Experiment
The objective of this study was to model the relative effectiveness of different policy interventions on the recruitment of nurses to rural areas in three different countries. [from introduction]
- 2358 reads
Who Wants to Work in a Rural Health Post? The Role of Intrinsic Motivation, Rural Background and Faith-Based Institutions in Ethiopia and Rwanda
This paper examines the extent to which health workers differ in their willingness to work in rural areas and the reasons for these differences, based on the data collected in Rwanda analysed individually and in combination with data from Ethiopia. [from introduction]
- 2237 reads