The Knowledge library

Workforce Effectiveness

Nigeria’s Primary Health Care Training Institutions: Challenges and Progress

Nigeria is one of 57 countries defined by the World Health Organization as having a critical shortage of health workers. CapacityPlus undertook an assessment of Nigerian midwifery, health technology, and nursing schools to better understand the progress and challenges in producing greater numbers of competent and qualified health providers. Nineteen schools were assessed through focus group interviews and on-site evaluations. Presented at the 9th Annual Physician Workforce Research Conference in Alexandria, VA on May 2-3, 2013, this poster depicts the challenges that health care training institutions face in Nigeria, along with recommendations to overcome these challenges.

Outils de rétention des prestataires en milieu rural

Beaucoup de pays éprouvent des difficultés à attirer et à retenir un nombre et des types de prestataires de soins suffisants capables de dispenser des services de qualité en milieu rural et dans les zones éloignées. Pour faciliter l’appropriation des approches au niveau des pays et plaider pour l’utilisation de données dans le cadre de la prise de décision, le projet CapacityPlus financé par l’USAID a développé deux outils : les outils d’enquête de rétention rapide et le logiciel iHRIS Retain qui va de pair avec ce document et qui a été développé en collaboration avec l’Organisation mondiale de la santé.

User Guide with Case Studies: How to Conduct a Discrete Choice Experiment for Health Workforce Recruitment and Retention in Remote and Rural Areas

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.

Retaining Health Workers: A Toolkit to Develop Evidence-Based Incentive Packages

An overview of the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit: Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Health Workers, intended to allow human resources managers to determine health workers’ motivational preferences.

iHRIS Retain: A Tool to Cost Retention Strategies

An overview of iHRIS Retain, a user-friendly tool to cost retention strategies to be implemented at the district, regional, or national level.

Why Would I Go There? Motivating Workers to Take and Keep Jobs in Rural Areas

Given the complexity of the social, professional, and economic factors that influence motivation, how do institutions make rural job postings more attractive? While many recognize that salary is an important factor, other characteristics of a job—such as better living or working conditions, supportive supervision, opportunities for continuing professional development, career advancement, networking, and even public recognition—can improve a worker’s sense of purpose and productivity. Identifying and offering the right incentive package to workers can result in a win-win situation, with benefits for both the worker and the community served. To address this issue of job attraction and retention in the health sector, CapacityPlus has helped ministries of health and NGOs answer these questions by using a rapid discrete choice experiment, a rigorous survey method that identifies the trade-offs that workers would be willing to make between specific job characteristics. Garnering statistical evidence of what motivates workers provides policy-makers with the needed information to develop more cost-effective job incentive strategies. This article originally appeared in the December 2012 issue of Monthly Developments Magazine (www.monthlydevelopments.org).

Designing Evidence-Based Incentives to Attract and Retain Health Workers Using the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit

This eLearning course produced by CapacityPlus’s HRH Global Resource Center is based on CapacityPlus's Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit: Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Health Workers. The course trains participants on how to use a rapid discrete choice experiment methodology to design evidence-based incentives to attract and retain health workers in rural and remote areas.

Read related news. Register and take the course online using the link above.

Designing Evidence-Based Incentive Strategies for Health Worker Retention

Many countries struggle to attract and retain sufficient numbers and types of health workers to provide quality services in rural and remote areas. Ministries of health often rely on external partners to develop the evidence base for formulating retention strategies, use less rigorous methodologies, or forego data altogether when making policy decisions. Presented at the Second Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Beijing on November 1, 2012, this poster describes two new tools—the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit and the iHRIS Retain costing tool for retention interventions—and related results from Ministry of Health surveys in Lao People’s Democratic Republic and Uganda.