Health workers play a critical role in the provision of health care and represent the single largest cost element in providing health services in low-income countries. Many of the poorest countries in the world have been unable to meet the pressing health needs of their populations. Millions of people die prematurely, or suffer from illness or disability unnecessarily, because appropriate human resources for health (HRH) to provide care are not available to them.
While the health workforce situation is complex and addressing it requires a long term commitment from multiple stakeholders, there are actions that countries could take immediately to alleviate the health conditions of their populations. This document explains seven financing and economic issues that matter for health workforce scale-up and financing. It then states twenty-nine actions that policy-makers could take right away to address the issues, independent of any long-term HRH interventions in progress.
The seven issues are closely connected and interdependent. Some of them, such as fiscal space and funding health workforce employment, are relevant to global policymakers and development partners as well as country-level policy-makers. Others, such as in-service and pre-service training, deployment, efficiency, and resource management, are mainly for country-level policy-makers to tackle.
The seven issues are based on an extensive review and synthesis of the literature, research findings, and experience to date on the financing and economic aspects of the health workforce scale-up and improvement, conducted by the Alliance Task Force on Financing and documented in “Financing and economic aspects
of health workforce scale-up and improvement: Framework Paper.”