Last week, public health professionals, students, and government workers from across the country and abroad filled the George Washington University’s Marvin Center’s third floor to attend USAID’s 10th Annual Global Health Mini-University. The day-long program offered over 80 sessions and poster presentations on topics spanning technology, workforce issues, funding, and diseases.
Innovation
In an afternoon session, Maurice Middleberg proposed a strategy for the Obama Administration’s Global Health Initiative (GHI) to consider for addressing the current worldwide health worker shortage. “The US should create HRH [human resources for health] strategies that are responsive to national HRH strategies, with country ownership,” said Middleberg. Furthermore, the strategy must also address health workers’ needs. In addition to training and deploying new health workers, the GHI strategy must include retention. “Nobody stops to ask the health worker why she or he is leaving. It turns out that health workers are real human beings with complex needs,” he said. Read more »
In January, I added the 3,000th resource to the 
I still find out most of my important health workforce information via word of mouth. Yes, I regularly read the latest journal articles and subscribe to half a dozen human resources for health (HRH) and health systems listservs, follow over 250 people on Twitter, and receive RSS updates from several HRH websites, but I never seem to get the information I really need. Who is working to strengthen health managers? What country is interested in designing a retention package for its health workers? What funder might be interested in funding a survey of how health workers currently use their mobile phones and how they would like to use them to do their jobs better? In this digital world there has to be a better way for us to share information. 
he beginning of 
Why do we publish health research? If the editors of PLoS Medicine are correct that “
The transformative scale-up of health worker 
