A technical framework for costing health workforce retention schemes in remote and rural areas.

Background: Increasing the availability of health workers in remote and rural areas through improved health workforce recruitment and retention is crucial to population health. However, information about the costs of such policy interventions often appears incomplete, fragmented or missing, despite its importance for the sound selection, planning, implementation and evaluation of these policies. This lack of a systematic approach to costing poses a serious challenge for strong health policy decisions.

How to recruit and retain health workers in underserved areas: the Senegalese experience.

Problem: Significant regional disparities in human resources for health deployment in Senegal weaken the country's health system and compromise population health.

Approach: In recent years, the Ministry of Health adopted measures to improve the posting, recruitment and retention of health workers in rural and remote areas. One was the introduction of a special contracting system to recruit health workers.

Evaluated strategies to increase attraction and retention of health workers in remote and rural areas.

The lack of health workers in remote and rural areas is a worldwide concern. Many countries have proposed and implemented interventions to address this issue, but very little is known about the effectiveness of such interventions and their sustainability in the long run. This paper provides an analysis of the effectiveness of interventions to attract and retain health workers in remote and rural areas from an impact evaluation perspective.

Sub-Saharan Africa: beyond the health worker migration crisis?

Migration of skilled health workers from sub-Saharan African countries has significantly increased in this century, with most countries becoming sources of migrants. Despite the growing problem of health worker migration for the effective functioning of health care systems there is a remarkable paucity and incompleteness of data. Hence, it is difficult to determine the real extent of migration from, and within, Africa, and thus develop effective forecasting or remedial policies.