Browse by Geographic Focus

This video resource details the social, economic and health care services disparities between urban and rural areas of Tajikistan and how women there struggle with their health and the role of men, or the lack thereof, in supporting them. [adapted from synopsis]

This video resource chronicles how after a truce in Nepal's civil war, a mobile reproductive health team is reaching isolated communities that have had no health services for years. [adapted from synopsis]

This video resource shows how midwives and community volunteers are helping more Cambodian women to increase the time between births, thereby contributing to healthier pregnancies, infants and families as well as to a better chance of escaping poverty. [adapted from synopsis]

This commentary article is focused on encouraging debate and discussion as to how health care professionals in the developed world might wish to re-think the relationship with colleagues in other health care environments and consider how to work together on a theme of two-way shared learning rather than one-way aid. [adapted from abstract]

The human resources crisis in Africa is especially acute in the public health field. This paper describes the innovative aspects of the distance education program at the School of Public Health of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Strategies are proposed for scaling up such a program to meet the growing need in this essential area of health human resource capacity development in Africa. [adapted from abstract]

Ethiopia does not have a sufficient health care workforce to meet the population’s demand for services and the burden of disease. The objective of this project was to assess the usefulness and feasibility of collecting key participant and training information for monitoring and planning of HIV/AIDS services. This paper describes a project that uses training data to follow up with providers after training to assess whether they are still working in HIV/AIDS-related services. [adapted from introduction]

Health care workers in developing countries continue to lack access to basic, practical information to enable them to deliver safe, effective care. This paper provides the first phase of a broader literature review of the information and learning needs of health care providers in developing countries. [from abstract]

International recruitment of health professionals has been high on the policy debate agenda in recent years with increasing advocacy for the development of an international code of practice, notably the current draft for a WHO global code. This paper assesses the effect of the first national code, which has been in place in England since 2001 and as such has lessons for current initiatives in other countries and globally. [from introduction]

This article provides an overview of how new research in India and Nigeria offers innovative strategies to improve health care provider performance.

This policy brief explores the major challenges facing Kenya in the implementation of their Integrated Management of Childhood Illness strategy and looks at why it is failing to fulfill its potential to improve health care and reduce child mortality. [adapted from introduction]

The health worker shortage in sub-Saharan Africa derives from many causes, yet the dynamics of entry into and exit from the health workforce in many of these countries remain poorly understood. This limits the capacity of national governments and their international development partners to design and implement appropriate intervention programmes. This paper provides some of this information through the first systematic estimates of health worker inflow and outflow in selected sub-Saharan African countries. [adapted from introduction]

This study involves the development and evaluation of training materials for provider-initiated HIV counseling and testing, HIV prevention and integrated primary HIV care and support for use by health care workers involved in the care of patients with TB at the primary health care clinic level in the Democratic Republic of Congo. [adapted from abstract]

This article reports on research that assessed international and national best practice in the selection of students for graduate entry medical courses in order to investigate correlations between medical student selection procedures and exposure to rural medical practice during medical training with choice of careers in rural medicine. Central to the study was the issue of the medical workforce shortage in Australia’s rural communities. [from introduction]

This study aims to undertake a national assessment of existing district management structures, competencies and current training programmes in order to inform a national strategy and plan to strengthen district management capacity to ensure effective delivery of primary health care in South Africa. [from introduction]

Tanzania is implementing the Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI), developed by the WHO and UNICEF to improve the management of child health at the primary care level in order to reduce child mortality in low and middle income countries. Workers in health facilities are trained in a structured IMCI case management course. IMCI also advocates the strengthening of the health system to facilitate practice of the skills acquired by health workers, as well as calling for improvement of household and community practices related to child health. [from executive summary]

Medical doctors and nurses in Bangladesh are concentrated in urban secondary and tertiary hospitals, while 70% of the population lives in rural areas. This situation has created a major challenge for the national health system, particularly for reducing the high maternal mortality rate, with fewer than 20% of births being attended by a skilled birth attendant. The Declaration of Safe Motherhood was desgined to address this issue, supportetd by a number of national programs and strategies. [from summary]

Ethiopia suffers from an acute shortage of health workers at every level, and rural areas in which 85% of the population live have been particularly chronically under-served. The Ministry of Health chose to focus on community level provision, initiating the Health Extension Programme in 2004. This is outlined in the current Health Sector Development Plan, which focuses on both human resource development and the construction and rehabilitation of facilities. [adapted from introduction]

Currently, a wide variety of community health workers are active in many antiretroviral treatment delivery sites. This article investigates whether present community health worker programmes for antiretroviral treatment are taking into account the lessons learnt from past experiences with community health worker programmes in primary health care and to what extent they are seizing the new antiretroviral treatment-specific opportunities. [from abstract]

This commentary outlines strategies the authors have found successful in aligning health education and training with local health needs in ways that demonstrate socially accountable outcomes for Vancouver Island, Canada. [adapted from abstract]

A Health Management Information System (HMIS) can be a powerful tool to make health care delivery more effective and far more efficient. This paper describes how an HMIS can also be used for organisational development and reports on the experiences of the HMIS programme of the Uganda Catholic Medical Bureau (UCMB) in Uganda. [from abstract]

This study explores the experience of conflict as perceived by Iranian hospital nurses in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran. Although conflict-control approaches have been extensively researched throughout the world, no research-based data are available on the perception of conflict and effective resolutions among hospital nurses in Iran. [adapted from abstract]

Rural township health centres and urban community health centres play a crucial role in the delivery of primary health care in China. The limited availability and low qualifications of human resources in health are among the main challenges facing lower-level health facilities. This paper aims to analyse the mobility of health workers in township and community health centres. [from abstract]

The Mothers’ Support Group empowers mothers and mother-to-be to access peer-based support and make linkages to services such as family planning, infant-feeding, counseling, nutriotional guidance, antiretroviral therapy, prevention of mother-to-child transmission and health institutional delivery. [from author]

Insufficient attention has been paid to understanding what determines the performance of health workers and how they make labor market choices. This paper reports on findings from focus group discussions with both health workers and users of health services in Ethiopia. We describe performance problems identified by both health users and health workers participating in the focus group discussions including absenteeism and shirking, pilfering drugs and materials, informal health care provision and illicit charging, and corruption.

The issue of participation by medical providers from wealthy countries in short-term medical volunteer work in resource-poor countries has been reaised as being potentially harmful to recipient communities. This exploratory study examines the perception of short-term medical volunteer work in Guatemala from the perspective of members of recipient communities affected by or participating in these programs. [adapted from sbstract]

In the face of medical workforce shortages, governments are looking to displace doctors with alternative health care providers like nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and other health professionals such as psychologists and pharmacists to relieve bottlenecks in health care delivery. Displacing doctors in this way, or role or task substitution as it is also termed, has been actively pursued in the United Kingdom and United States. How should the medical profession react to these developments? [from author]

This study undertook an in-depth exploration of the unintended consequences of pay-for-performance programs In England and California. The authors interviewed primary care physicians in California and England and compared unintended consequences in each setting. [adapted from abstract]

Health facility assessments are being increasingly used to measure and monitor indicators of health workforce performance, but the global evidence base remains weak. The World Health Organization coordinated a series of facility-based surveys using a common approach in six countries: Chad, Cote d’Ivoire, Jamaica, Mozambique, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. The objectives were to inform the development and monitoring of human resources for health policy within the countries; and to test and validate the use of standardized facility-based human resources assessment tools across different contexts.

This presentation covers the state of the health workforce in Ethiopia and defines the crisis in health worker coverage including numerous charts and staistics that track the decline in the number of doctors.

East African countries have in the recent past experienced a tremendous increase in the volume of antiretroviral drugs. Capacity to manage these medicines in the region remains limited. Makerere University established a network of academic institutions to build capacity for pharmaceutical management in the East African region. The initiative includes institutions from Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda and aims to improve access to safe, effective and quality-assured medicines for the treatment of HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria through spearheading in-country capacity.