BACKGROUND In Vietnam, a lower-middle income country, while the overall skill- and knowledge-based quality of health workforce is improving, health workers are disproportionately distributed across different economic regions. A similar trend appears to be in relation to health outcomes between those regions. It is unclear, however, whether there is any relationship between the distribution of h...

Human resources for health (HRH) will have to be strengthened if universal health coverage (UHC) is to be achieved. Existing health workforce benchmarks focus exclusively on the density of physicians, nurses and midwives and were developed with the objective of attaining relatively high coverage of skilled birth attendance and other essential health services of relevance to the health Millenniu...

Growing government support has been evident during the past decade for macro-level workforce planning to ensure that future populations have access to appropriate health care services. Population ageing is impacting on workforce requirements and on workforce supply within Australia and internationally. Changes in financing and the organisation of health services are impacting on the availabilit...

Aims/Objectives In a climate of workforce transition, enhanced specialisation and role transfer, it is timely to address the impact of workforce flexibility on practitioners in non-specialist roles. This study aimed to use podiatry as a case exemplar (as one of the Allied Health Professions) to explore the possible impact of workforce redesign policies on role boundaries on generalist podiatris...

In addition to establishing Canadian federal institutions for public health to work in cooperation with provincial and local health authorities, the infrastructure of public health for the future depends on a multi-disciplinary and well-prepared workforce. Traditionally, Canada trained its public health workforce in schools of public health (or hygiene), but in recent decades this has been carr...

This policy statement describes the key issues related to diversity within the pediatrician and health care workforce to identify barriers to enhancing diversity and offer policy recommendations to overcome these barriers in the future. The statement addresses topics such as health disparities, affirmative action, recent policy developments and reports on workforce diversity, and research on pa...

The 'crisis in human resources' in the health sector has been described as one of the most pressing global health issues of our time. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the world faces a global shortage of almost 4.3 million doctors, midwives, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. A global undersupply of these threatens the quality and sustainability of health systems worl...

Health workforce indicators?1 Those should be easy. We just need to count the numbers entering from training institutions or through re-entry, the numbers working, and the numbers exiting. If we know where these people work, we have the distribution of health workers within a country, and if we also have information on their competencies, responsiveness and productivity, we can know about their...