What ’s the Best Way to Retain a Health Worker? Just Ask Her!

By Kate Tulenko. The world currently has a shortage of some 4 million health workers. This shortage is amplified by a complete mismatch between where health workers are stationed and where they are most needed. The healthier and wealthier a community is, the more health workers it has. The poorer and sicker a community, the fewer health workers it has. The situation is worsening as every year hundreds of thousands of health workers move from poor, rural, and underserved communities to wealthier, metropolitan communities with a surfeit of health workers. This occurs both within countries (a nurse moving from a rural area to the capital city) and between countries (a doctor moving from a developing country to a wealthy country).
Governments and their development partners have struggled to address this problem. Many have tried mandating new graduates to provide a few years of service in underserved areas. These programs have met with variable success depending on the governments’ commitment and ability to enforce the plan. Since the publication of the World Health Organization’s well-thought out and evidence-based guidelines on increasing access to health workers in rural areas, some health systems are implementing mid- and long-term solutions such as recruiting and training health workers in underserved communities.
But governments are under intense pressure to solve the problem now. Some have tried rural retention schemes but many of these have been too expensive to mainta...

Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - September 27, 2018 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: blogs