Understanding why health workers want or don’t want to take posts and remain in remote and rural areas is a prerequisite to formulating appropriate policy responses to the shortage of health workers in these areas. Building on the World Health Organization (WHO) Guidelines on Increasing Access to Health Workers in Remote and Rural Areas through Improved Retention, this user guide proposes an innovative methodology, the discrete choice experiment (DCE), to measure the strength of health workers’ preferences and trade-offs related to different job characteristics that can influence their decision to take up rural postings. The user guide offers step-by-step advice on the application of DCE to identify policy interventions appropriate to a particular country context. The guide is the product of close collaboration among three agencies—the World Bank, the WHO, and USAID/CapacityPlus—and represents their shared commitment to supporting policy-relevant research on critical topics related to human resources for health.
The Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit is designed to help countries determine what would motivate health workers to accept and remain in rural posts. It builds on the World Health Organization global policy recommendations for rural retention and is based on the discrete choice experiment (DCE), a powerful research method that identifies the trade-offs professionals are willing to make between specific job characteristics and determines their preferences for various incentive packages, including the probability of accepting a post in a rural facility. Employing a simplified version of the DCE methodology, the toolkit guides HR managers through the survey process to quickly assess health students’ and health workers’ motivational preferences to accept a position and continue working in underserved facilities. The results can be used to create evidence-based incentive packages that are appropriate within a country’s health labor market. 
