Workforce Effectiveness

iHRIS Retain is an open source tool to cost health worker retention interventions. People living in rural and remote areas need more skilled health workers to care for their communities. However, attracting and retaining health workers to serve in these areas is a challenge. Developed by CapacityPlus in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO), iHRIS Retain is based on the WHO’s 2010 global policy recommendations on retention, which offer guidance on the different interventions in the areas of education, regulation, financial incentives, and professional development that can increase access to health workers in remote and rural areas through improved retention. iHRIS Retain guides users through the costing process step by step, collecting necessary data, calculating the costs of interventions, and comparing costs to available funding. The resulting information can then be used to develop retention strategies at the district, regional, or national level.

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CapacityPlus Technical Brief #4 (PDF)

Providing high-quality health care should not be hazardous to the health worker. Health workers are adversely affected by numerous occupational safety and health (OSH) hazards they face on the job. Effective OSH measures contribute to national workforce health and productivity, but only 5%-10% of workers in developing countries have adequate OSH services. This technical brief outlines ways to make health workers’ safety a higher-level policy issue and shows how to create working environments that prioritize occupational health.

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In low-income countries, failure to attract and retain health workers in rural areas reduces population access to health services and undermines facility performance, resulting in poor health outcomes. This article in BMC Health Services Research presents findings from CapacityPlus’s study on preferences for job characteristics among final-year medical, nursing, pharmacy, and laboratory students at select universities in Uganda. The findings contribute to mounting evidence that salary is not the only important factor health workers consider when deciding where to work.