Articles

An experience of virtual leadership development for human resource managers

Strong leadership and management skills are crucial to finding solutions to the human resource crisis in health. Health professionals and human resource (HR) managers worldwide who are in charge of addressing ...

Authors: Karen E Sherk, Fiona Nauseda, Sarah Johnson and Delphine Liston

A strategy to improve skills in pharmaceutical supply management in East Africa: the regional technical resource collaboration for pharmaceutical management

International initiatives such as the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief and the President's Malaria Initiative have significantly increased ava...

Authors: Lloyd Matowe, Paul Waako, Richard Odoi Adome, Isaac Kibwage, Omary Minzi and Emile Bienvenu

Health worker densities and immunization coverage in Turkey: a panel data analysis

Increased immunization coverage is an important step towards fulfilling the Millennium Development Goal of reducing childhood mortality. Recent cross-sectional and cross-national research has indicated that ph...

Authors: Andrew D Mitchell, Thomas J Bossert, Winnie Yip and Salih Mollahaliloglu

Development of a quality assurance handbook to improve educational courses in Africa

The attainment of the Millennium Development Goals has been hampered by the lack of skilled and well-informed health care workers in many developing countries. The departure of health care workers from develop...

Authors: Helen M Nabwera, Sue Purnell and Imelda Bates

Central America Field Epidemiology Training Program (CA FETP): a pathway to sustainable public health capacity development

The Central America Field Epidemiology Training Program (CA FETP) is a public health capacity-building training programme aimed at developing high-caliber field epidemiologists at various levels of the public ...

Authors: Augusto López and Victor M Cáceres

Focusing on the essentials: learning for performance

As The World health report 2006 emphasized, there is increasing consensus that training programmes should focus on "know-how" instead of "know-all." Health workers need to know how to do the job they will be expe...

Authors: Catherine J Murphy

Appropriate training and retention of community doctors in rural areas: a case study from Mali

While attraction of doctors to rural settings is increasing in Mali, there is concern for their retention. An orientation course for young practicing rural doctors was set up in 2003 by a professional associat...

Authors: Monique Van Dormael, Sylvie Dugas, Yacouba Kone, Seydou Coulibaly, Mansour Sy, Bruno Marchal and Dominique Desplats

Strategies to overcome physician shortages in northern Ontario: A study of policy implementation over 35 years

Shortages and maldistibution of physicians in northern Ontario, Canada, have been a long-standing issue. This study seeks to document, in a chronological manner, the introduction of programmes intended to help...

Authors: Raymond W Pong

The role of leadership in HRH development in challenging public health settings

As part of the special feature on leadership and human resources (HR), Management Sciences for Health profiles three leaders who have made a significance difference in the HR situation in their countries. By t...

Authors: Judith Schiffbauer, Julie Barrett O'Brien, Barbara K Timmons and William N Kiarie

Is satisfaction a direct predictor of nursing turnover? Modelling the relationship between satisfaction, expressed intention and behaviour in a longitudinal cohort study

The theory of planned behaviour states that attitudinal variables (e.g. job satisfaction) only have an indirect effect on retention whereas intentions have a direct effect. This study uses secondary data from ...

Authors: Trevor Murrells, Sarah Robinson and Peter Griffiths

Human resources for maternal health: multi-purpose or specialists?

A crucial question in the aim to attain MDG5 is whether it can be achieved faster with the scaling up of multi-purpose health workers operating in the community or with the scaling up of professional skilled b...

Authors: Vincent Fauveau, Della R Sherratt and Luc de Bernis

Training of front-line health workers for tuberculosis control: Lessons from Nigeria and Kyrgyzstan

Efficient human resources development is vital for facilitating tuberculosis control in developing countries, and appropriate training of front-line staff is an important component of this process. Africa and ...

Authors: Niyi Awofeso, Irina Schelokova and Abubakar Dalhatu

The health worker recruitment and deployment process in Kenya: an emergency hiring program

Despite a pool of unemployed health staff available in Kenya, staffing levels at most facilities were only 50%, and maldistribution of staff left many people without access to antiretroviral therapy (ART). Bec...

Authors: Ummuro Adano

Incentives for retaining and motivating health workers in Pacific and Asian countries

This paper was initiated by the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) after identifying the need for an in-depth synthesis and analysis of available literature and information on incentives ...

Authors: Lyn N Henderson and Jim Tulloch

Developing a competency-based curriculum in HIV for nursing schools in Haiti

Preparing health workers to confront the HIV/AIDS epidemic is an urgent challenge in Haiti, where the HIV prevalence rate is 2.2% and approximately 10 100 people are taking antiretroviral treatment. There is a...

Authors: Elisa Knebel, Nancy Puttkammer, Adrien Demes, Ruth Devirois and Mona Prismy

The double burden of human resource and HIV crises: a case study of Malawi

Two crises dominate the health sectors of sub-Saharan African countries: those of human resources and of HIV. Nevertheless, there is considerable variation in the extent to which these two phenomena affect sub...

Authors: David McCoy, Barbara McPake and Victor Mwapasa

Human resource development and antiretroviral treatment in Free State province, South Africa

In common with other developing countries, South Africa's public health system is characterised by human resource shortfalls. These are likely to be exacerbated by the escalating demand for HIV care and a larg...

Authors: Dingie HCJ van Rensburg, Francois Steyn, Helen Schneider and Les Loffstadt

Empowering primary care workers to improve health services: results from Mozambique's leadership and management development program

This article is the third article in the Human Resources for Health journal's feature on the theme of leadership and management in public health. The series of six articles has been contributed by Management S...

Authors: Cary Perry

Scaling up kangaroo mother care in South Africa: 'on-site' versus 'off-site' educational facilitation

Scaling up the implementation of new health care interventions can be challenging and demand intensive training or retraining of health workers. This paper reports on the results of testing the effectiveness o...

Authors: Anne-Marie Bergh, Elise van Rooyen and Robert C Pattinson

Assessing the impact of a new health sector pay system upon NHS staff in England

Pay and pay systems are a critical element in any health sector human resource strategy. Changing a pay system can be one strategy to achieve or sustain organizational change. This paper reports on the design ...

Authors: James Buchan and David Evans

Improving retention and performance in civil society in Uganda

This article is the second article in the Human Resources for Health journal's first quarterly feature. The series of seven articles has been contributed by Management Sciences for Health (MSH) under the theme...

Authors: Mary L O'Neil and Michael Paydos

Human resource leadership: the key to improved results in health

This article is the lead article in the Human Resources for Health journal's first quarterly feature. The series of seven articles has been contributed by Management Sciences for Health (MSH) under the theme o...

Authors: Mary L O'Neil

Workforce participation among international medical graduates in the National Health Service of England: a retrospective longitudinal study

Balancing medical workforce supply with demand requires good information about factors affecting retention. Overseas qualified doctors comprise 30% of the National Health Service (NHS) workforce in England yet...

Authors: Mark Hann, Bonnie Sibbald and Ruth Young

Human resources for health challenges of public health system reform in Georgia

Human resources (HR) are one of the most important components determining performance of public health system. The aim of this study was to assess adequacy of HR of local public health agencies to meet the nee...

Authors: Mamuka Djibuti, George Gotsadze, George Mataradze and George Menabde

Review of the utilization of HEEPF – competitive projects for educational enhancement in the Egyptian medical sector

In Egypt, the medical sector has been facing the same problems that challenged the system of higher education in the past decades, mainly an increasing student enrollment, limited resources, and old governance...

Authors: Galal Abdel-Hamid Abdellah, Salah El-Din Mohamed Fahmy Taher and Somaya Hosny

Empowering the people: Development of an HIV peer education model for low literacy rural communities in India

Despite ample evidence that HIV has entered the general population, most HIV awareness programs in India continue to neglect rural areas. Low HIV awareness and high stigma, fueled by low literacy, seasonal mig...

Authors: Koen KA Van Rompay, Purnima Madhivanan, Mirriam Rafiq, Karl Krupp, Venkatesan Chakrapani and Durai Selvam

Intent to migrate among nursing students in Uganda: Measures of the brain drain in the next generation of health professionals

There is significant concern about the worldwide migration of nursing professionals from low-income countries to rich ones, as nurses are lured to fill the large number of vacancies in upper-income countries. ...

Authors: Lisa Nguyen, Steven Ropers, Esther Nderitu, Anneke Zuyderduin, Sam Luboga and Amy Hagopian

Managerial competencies of hospital managers in South Africa: a survey of managers in the public and private sectors

South Africa has large public and private sectors and there is a common perception that public sector hospitals are inefficient and ineffective while the privately owned and managed hospitals provide superior ...

Authors: Rubin Pillay

What if we decided to take care of everyone who needed treatment? Workforce planning in Mozambique using simulation of demand for HIV/AIDS care

The growing AIDS epidemic in southern Africa is placing an increased strain on health systems, which are experiencing steadily rising patient loads. Health care systems are tackling the barriers to serving lar...

Authors: Amy Hagopian, Mark A Micek, Ferruccio Vio, Kenneth Gimbel-Sherr and Pablo Montoya

Workforce analysis using data mining and linear regression to understand HIV/AIDS prevalence patterns

The achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) depends on sufficient supply of health workforce in each country. Although country-level data support this contention, it has been difficult to evalua...

Authors: Elizabeth A Madigan, Olivier Louis Curet and Miklos Zrinyi

New data on African health professionals abroad

The migration of doctors and nurses from Africa to developed countries has raised fears of an African medical brain drain. But empirical research on the causes and effects of the phenomenon has been hampered b...

Authors: Michael A Clemens and Gunilla Pettersson

Major surgery delegation to mid-level health practitioners in Mozambique: health professionals' perceptions

This study examines the opinions of health professionals about the capacity and performance of the 'técnico de cirurgia', a surgically trained assistant medical officer in the Mozambican health system. Particu...

Authors: Amelia Cumbi, Caetano Pereira, Raimundo Malalane, Fernando Vaz, Colin McCord, Alberta Bacci and Staffan Bergström

Improving quality of reproductive health care in Senegal through formative supervision: results from four districts

In Senegal, traditional supervision often focuses more on collection of service statistics than on evaluation of service quality. This approach yields limited information on quality of care and does little to ...

Authors: Siri Suh, Philippe Moreira and Moussa Ly

Public-private options for expanding access to human resources for HIV/AIDS in Botswana

In responding to the goal of rapidly increasing access to antiretroviral treatment (ART), the government of Botswana undertook a major review of its health systems options to increase access to human resources...

Authors: Norbert Dreesch, Jennifer Nyoni, Ontlametse Mokopakgosi, Khumo Seipone, Jean Alfazema Kalilani, Owen Kaluwa and Vincent Musowe

Alumni survey of Masters of Public Health (MPH) training at the Hanoi School of Public Health

1) To elicit the opinions of the Public Health alumni of the MPH program; 2) To assess the applicability of the knowledge and skills acquired; 3) To identify the frequency of the public health competencies tha...

Authors: Linh Cu Le, Quyen Tu Bui, Ha Thanh Nguyen and Arie Rotem

The precarious supply of physical therapists across Canada: exploring national trends in health human resources (1991 to 2005)

Health Human Resource (HHR) ratios are one measure of workforce supply, and are often expressed as a ratio in the number of health professionals to a sub-set of the population. In this study, we explore nation...

Authors: Michel D Landry, Thomas C Ricketts and Molly C Verrier

Final call for papers: "Towards a scaling-up of training and education for health workers"

Authors: Daniel MP Shaw

Initial community perspectives on the Health Service Extension Programme in Welkait, Ethiopia

The Health Service Extension Programme (HSEP) is an innovative approach to addressing the shortfall in health human resources in Ethiopia. It has developed a new cadre of Health Extension Workers (HEWs), who a...

Authors: Haile Negusse, Eilish McAuliffe and Malcolm MacLachlan

Human resource management in the Georgian National Immunization Program: a baseline assessment

Georgia's health care system underwent dramatic reform after gaining independence in 1991. The decentralization of the health care system was one of the core elements of health care reform but reports suggest ...

Authors: Laura C Esmail, Jillian Clare Cohen-Kohler and Mamuka Djibuti

The contribution of international health volunteers to the health workforce in sub-Saharan Africa

In this paper, we aim to quantify the contribution of international health volunteers to the health workforce in sub-Saharan Africa and to explore the perceptions of health service managers regarding these vol...

Authors: Geert Laleman, Guy Kegels, Bruno Marchal, Dirk Van der Roost, Isa Bogaert and Wim Van Damme

HIV and infant feeding counselling: challenges faced by nurse-counsellors in northern Tanzania

Infant feeding is a subject of worry in prevention of mother to child transmission (pMTCT) programmes in settings where breastfeeding is normative. Nurse-counsellors, expected to counsel HIV-positive women on ...

Authors: Sebalda C Leshabari, Astrid Blystad, Marina de Paoli and Karen M Moland

Postoperative outcome of caesarean sections and other major emergency obstetric surgery by clinical officers and medical officers in Malawi

Clinical officers perform much of major emergency surgery in Malawi, in the absence of medical officers. The aim of this study was to validate the advantages and disadvantages of delegation of major obstetric ...

Authors: Garvey Chilopora, Caetano Pereira, Francis Kamwendo, Agnes Chimbiri, Eddie Malunga and Staffan Bergström

Impact of an in-built monitoring system on family planning performance in rural Bangladesh

During 1982–1992, the Maternal and Child Health Family Planning (MCH-FP) Extension Project (Rural) of International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), in partnership with the Ministr...

Authors: Humayun Kabir, Rukhsana Gazi, Ali Ashraf and Nirod Chandra Saha

Nurses' experiences of recruitment and migration from developing countries: a phenomenological approach

There is growing concern globally at the current flows of nurse migration, particularly from low-income to middle and high-income countries. Recruitment practices of many countries such as Ireland are thought ...

Authors: Paul H Troy, Laura A Wyness and Eilish McAuliffe

Call for manuscripts: "Towards a scaling-up of training and education for health workers"

Authors: Mario R Dal Poz, Hugo Mercer, Margaret Gadon and Daniel MP Shaw

New Role, New Country: introducing US physician assistants to Scotland

This paper draws from research commissioned by the Scottish Executive Health Department (SEHD). It provides a case study in the introduction of a new health care worker role into an already well established an...

Authors: James Buchan, Fiona O'May and Jane Ball

How labour intensive is a doctor-based delivery model for antiretroviral treatment (ART)? Evidence from an observational study in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Funding for scaling-up antiretroviral treatment (ART) in low-income countries has increased substantially, but the lack of human resources for health (HRH) is increasingly being identified as an important cons...

Authors: Wim Van Damme, Soy Ty Kheang, Bart Janssens and Katharina Kober

The training and expectations of medical students in Mozambique

This paper describes the socio-economic profile of medical students in the 1998/99 academic year at the Universidade Eduardo Mondlane (UEM) Medical Faculty in Maputo. It aims to identify their social and geogr...

Authors: Fernando Sousa Jr, João Schwalbach, Yussuf Adam, Luzia Gonçalves and Paulo Ferrinho

The College of Medicine in the Republic of Malawi: towards sustainable staff development

Malawi has a critical human resources problem particularly in the health sector. There is a severe shortage of doctors; there are only few medical specialists. The College of Medicine (COM) is the only medical...

Authors: Ed E Zijlstra and Robert L Broadhead

Human resources for health planning and management in the Eastern Mediterranean region: facts, gaps and forward thinking for research and policy

The early decades of the 21^st century are considered to be the era of human resources for health (HRH). The World Health Report (WHR) 2006 launched the Health Workforce Decade (2006–2015), with high priority give...

Authors: Fadi El-Jardali, Diana Jamal, Ahmad Abdallah and Kassem Kassak