News: Health Workers

The global agenda is clear: universal health coverage. And as we heard at the Third Global Forum on Human Resources for Health , a strong, qualified health workforce is essential to achieving this goal. But how do we create a strong global health workforce that can provide care to all 7 billion of us? One of the keys is information—reliable, accurate information on health workers’ skills and qualifications. Data on individual health workers’...

iHRIS team lead Dykki Settle is co-author of an article appearing in the November 2013 Bulletin of the World Health Organization . The theme for the bulletin is "human resources for universal health coverage." The article, "Leveraging information technology to bridge the health workforce gap," makes recommendations for how information and communication technologies can be used in training, deploying, supporting, and empowering front-line health...

This week, a post by global development communications expert David J. Olson in the Huffington Post, "Years of Investments Finally Put Health Workers on the Global Stage," mentioned iHRIS as an example of how development aid is supporting health workers, the backbone of any health system. Here is the quote: And in Ghana, I saw IntraHealth's CapacityPlus project helping the Ministry of Health to introduce a health workforce information system...

Health workforce decision-makers now have a new tool for their toolbox: iHRIS Train, software that tracks health worker training and reports on the number of health professionals being produced in a country. iHRIS Train was recently launched in Uganda at an event hosted by the Ministry of Education and Sports. iHRIS Train is the newest addition to the open source iHRIS software and tools for tracking, managing, and planning the health workforce...

In Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), findings from the Ministry of Health’s application of the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit and iHRIS Retain , with technical support from Capacity Plus and the World Health Organization, have informed the new national recruitment and retention policy for the health workforce. Announced this month, the policy stipulates that all new graduates in medicine, nursing, midwifery, pharmacy, and dentistry, as well...

The world needs approximately 4.3 million additional health workers. Africa alone needs 1.4 million more. Having the right number of health workers, however, is not enough. How can countries ensure their health workers are in the right positions to care for their populations, and how can countries plan for future needs? Picture this: the Ministry of Health asks the registrar at a nursing and midwifery council to provide the number of nurses...

Last week, Health Affairs published an article that projected a shortage of 818,000 doctors, nurses, and midwives in 31 sub-Saharan African countries by the year 2015. To come up with this figure, the authors examined both the estimated health worker demand (1.163 million) and compared it with the estimated supply (371,000). When looking at these numbers, it immediately becomes clear why this article is garnering attention in the HRH field—the...

The migration of health workers continues to be a hot topic in the healthcare world. The WHO’s 2006 World Health Report cited a global shortage of 4.3 million health workers. This shortage is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, which has 25% of the global burden of disease but only 3% of the world’s health workforce. The departure of health workers from their country of training often presents a significant cost to that country. The primary...

The need for better information on health workers is critical to addressing not just the oft-challenged health worker crisis, but to deal with any and all health issues, on every level from local communities to the entire world. There are many efforts undertaken around the world to improve the availability, analysis and use of health worker information. Governments, health service delivery organizations, parastatal registration and licensure...

Pape Gaye, IntraHealth ’s president and CEO, discussed the challenges of building sub-Saharan Africa’s capacity in health care and information communication technology (ICT) at the Public Health Informatics conference in Seattle, Washington, on September 19. Gaye spoke as part of the plenary session “Decision Support for Public Health and Policy Development: Building Capacity and Sustainability.” Gaye explained how IntraHealth’s Human Resources...