Institutional and system considerations
Health human resources demand and management: strategies to confront crisis
Present health goals require more resources and better leadership in many countries
Authors:
V. Hicks
Publisher:
Global Health Trust, 2004
This report, by the Joint Learning Initiative’s Working Group on Demand, considers health needs and current initiatives to improve health. The working group finds that labour markets for human resources have not produced the effective and motivated workforce that is necessary for the task and that the HRH efficiency is often impeded by low pay, low motivation, and dangerous working conditions. Financial crises during the past two decades have had a destabilising effect on health systems, and international recruitment of health professionals have impacted health workforces in developing countries.
The report highlights two key themes. Firstly, international intervention will be most effective if it is done in a way that supports and enables countries to move forward but does not dictate specific measures and strategies. Secondly, the most effective approach will be to improve community level care emphasising that strategies linked to this have shown great promise. It is also necessary to enlist communities themselves, by encouraging contributions of time and energy. The report makes a number of recommendations, including: focusing on building bottom-up capacity in decentralisation strategies; establishing and emergency response mechanism to address HRH workforce shortages; and working to improve HRH sector management by working across sectors and establishing a Global Knowledge Management Initiative. [adapted from author]
