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Human Resources for Health

Human resources for health (HRH) are the vital connection between drugs and technologies and the people and communities that need them. One of the biggest challenges to building effective treatment programs in developing countries is the shortage of appropriately trained health care workers and the adequate systems to manage them. CHAI has initiated country specific HRH programs in nine out of ten partner countries in Africa, with interventions including: training, clinical mentoring, recruiting, capacity building, and curriculum development, among others.

HRH in Zambia

Zambia is currently operating at roughly 50% of the workforce needed to deliver an essential health package of services to the country’s population and has one of the lowest densities of professional health workers in southern Africa with staff shortages across nearly every cadre. Both the government and other donors have long believed that poor retention of healthcare workers was the key driver of the shortage in Zambia and they have structured their interventions accordingly.

In mid- 2007, CHAI was asked by the Zambian MOH to help them close their human resource gap. As a first step CHAI developed a detailed forecast of human resource requirements and quantified where health care workers were falling out of the system. CHAI’s analysis demonstrated that the root causes of the HRH crisis in Zambia was not actually retention - even with a 100% retention rate Zambia would not meet its HRH needs. Instead the critical problem in Zambia is that pre-service training programs are poorly resourced and underdeveloped and do produce an adequate supply of qualified healthcare workers. As a result of this analysis the government is refocusing its resources on this crucial issue and beginning to develop more efficient pre-service training programs to dramatically expand the pipeline of qualified heath workers throughout the country. CHAI is helping to guide this process and will assist with the implementation of key aspects of the program.