Supporting Country-Led Efforts to Recruit and Retain Health Workers and Improve Their Productivity

CapacityPlus, with the USAID ASSIST Project and the World Bank, cohosted a knowledge-sharing and dissemination event at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on February 18. The three-hour program focused on the latest evidence from country applications of innovations to strengthen health workforce recruitment, retention, and productivity. Through a combination of panel presentations, interactive roundtable groups, and moderated question-and-answer sessions, participants learned about and discussed various approaches and tools that can be used to develop policies to strengthen recruitment, retention, and productivity and improve access to high-quality family planning, reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and other health services. Read the related news and access videos and presentations:

• Welcome and Opening Remarks

• Analyzing Markets for Health Workers: Insights from Labor and Health Economics (also see related presentation)

• Factors Influencing Health Workers’ Employment Decisions and Interventions to Address Geographic Imbalances in Health Workforce Distribution (also see related presentation)

• Improving Efficiency, Productivity, and Performance with the Workforce You Have, Not the One You Wish You Had (also see related presentation)

• Moderated Question-and-Answer Session

• Moving Forward with the Health Labor Market Agenda

• Using the WHO Recommendations for Increasing Access to Health Workers in Rural Areas

• Application of Discrete Choice Experiments to Identify Health Workers’ Employment Preferences

• Determining the Costs of Retention Strategies with iHRIS Retain Software

• Whose Job Is It? Educational Institutions and Their Responsibility for Retention of the Health Workers They Trained

• Methods and Interventions to Improve Efficiency, Productivity, and Performance with the Workforce You Have, Not the One You Wish You Had (see a related presentation, The Tanzania Health Worker Engagement Study: Exploring the Relationship between Engagement and Performance)

• Managing Dual Job Holding among Health Workers

• Health Worker Productivity Analysis and Improvement Toolkit

• Tools, Evidence, and Research Gaps for More Effective Community Health Worker Performance and Productivity

• Examining Potential for Quality Improvement in the Three Gaps