News

Many countries are striving to meet the demand for family planning, end preventable child and maternal deaths, and achieve an AIDS-free generation. The health workforce is critical for ensuring access to high-quality services in order to improve health outcomes. While increasing the number of health workers where there are shortages is essential, it is equally important to improve the productivity of the existing workforce and make service delivery more efficient.

CapacityPlus’s new Health Workforce Productivity Analysis and Improvement Toolkit describes a step-wise process to measure the productivity of facility-based health workers, understand the underlying causes of productivity problems, and identify potential interventions to address them. Read more »

Many countries are working to increase access to health care by recruiting more health workers to serve in rural areas. While nearly half the world’s population lives in rural areas, only 38% of the world’s nurses and a quarter of doctors work there. To help countries determine what would motivate health workers to accept and remain in rural posts, CapacityPlus developed the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit: Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Health Workers. Now, a revised edition contains improvements based on additional application in Namibia among pharmacists and pharmacy assistants, as part of the People that Deliver initiative and in collaboration with the Ministry of Health and Social Services and the University of Namibia. Read more »

To achieve universal health coverage and better health outcomes, the world needs more health workers. The global deficit of doctors, nurses, and midwives has reached over seven million, and could rise to 12.9 million by 2035. Educating and training an ample supply of new health workers, though, is hindered by a limited number of schools and the scarcity of resources to scale up their efforts.

CapacityPlus created the Bottlenecks and Best Buys Approach to help health professional schools pinpoint the obstacles they face in increasing the number of competent and qualified graduates, and then select priority challenges that can be overcome through limited yet strategic investments. Read more »