Data for Decision-Making

This article provides a comprehensive overview of the first-ever national application of the Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) tool developed by the World Health Organization. The article describes the steps involved in implementing WISN, a human resources management tool, in Namibia, discusses software and data challenges, summarizes key findings relating to health worker shortages and inequities, and reviews the utility of the WISN findings for policy-makers in Namibia. The authors observe that the WISN method can offer credible workload-based evidence to improve the equity and distribution of health workers within a region or across similar types of facilities nationwide. Perhaps most importantly, the WISN tool allows policy-makers to consider the potential impact of decisions on staff requirements before actually making the decisions.

Designing Evidence-Based Strategies Poster

Many countries struggle to attract and retain sufficient numbers and types of health workers to provide quality services in rural and remote areas. Ministries of health often rely on external partners to develop the evidence base for formulating retention strategies, use less rigorous methodologies, or forego data altogether when making policy decisions. Presented at the Second Global Symposium on Health Systems Research in Beijing on November 1, 2012, this poster describes two new tools—the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit and the iHRIS Retain costing tool for retention interventions—and related results from Ministry of Health surveys in Lao People’s Democratic Republic and Uganda.

Using Routine HRIS

This paper examines the effectiveness of USAID’s and IntraHealth International’s approach to using routine HRIS to strengthen the health workforce in low-resource settings. It appears as a chapter in a book containing all the papers presented at the International Conference on Research in Human Resources for Health, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, June 9-11, 2010. The book, O trabalho em saude: Abordagens quantitativas e qualitativas (eds. Célia Regina Pierantoni, Mario Roberto Dal Poz, and Tania França), is available at http://www.obsnetims.org.br/adm/arq/livro/2141551.pdf (7 MB).

Mali Country Brief

Working with the Ministry of Health, local training institutions, and other partners, CapacityPlus is addressing Mali’s shortage and unequal distribution of qualified health workers. Also available in French.