The Knowledge library

Technical Reports

Toward Development of a Rural Retention Strategy in Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Understanding Health Worker Preferences

This technical report presents the results of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) conducted by the Lao People’s Democratic Republic Ministry of Health, in partnership with the World Health Organization and CapacityPlus, using CapacityPlus’s rural retention survey toolkit. The DCE surveyed health professional students and health workers practicing in rural provinces to investigate their motivational preferences for potential strategies to increase attraction and retention in the country’s rural and remote settings.

Using Routine Human Resources Information Systems to Manage, Measure, and Monitor the Health Workforce

This paper examines the effectiveness of USAID’s and IntraHealth International’s approach to using routine HRIS to strengthen the health workforce in low-resource settings. It appears as a chapter in a book containing all the papers presented at the International Conference on Research in Human Resources for Health, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 9-11, 2010. The book, O trabalho em saude: Abordagens quantitativas e qualitativas (eds. Célia Regina Pierantoni, Mario Roberto Dal Poz, and Tania França), is available at http://www.obsnetims.org.br/adm/arq/livro/2141551.pdf (7 MB).

Determining Priority Retention Packages to Attract and Retain Health Workers in Rural and Remote Areas in Uganda

In Uganda, attracting and retaining health workers in rural and underserved areas has proven difficult. Positions staffed by the Ministry of Health in many of these areas remain 50% vacant. The Ministry of Health is committed to pursuing a package of strategies to make rural postings more attractive. One important step in determining which package of strategies will be most effective is to estimate which strategies health workers themselves most prefer. To this end, the Ministry of Health, in partnership with CapacityPlus, conducted a discrete choice experiment survey among current students in health training programs as well as health workers practicing in rural districts to investigate preferences for potential attraction and retention strategies. The results constitute an important input to the policy-making process related to the identification, costing, and selection of possible retention interventions for implementation. Read more »

Planning, Developing and Supporting the Health Workforce: Results and Lessons Learned from the Capacity Project, 2004-2009

The Capacity Project’s final report summarizes results and lessons learned from this five-year global project on human resources for health, as well as first-person perspectives and photographs from the field.