What Exactly Motivates and Retains Health Workers —and How Do We Measure It?

November 16, 2017The quirks, preferences, and priorities that drive our decisions are tough to nail down.Human beings do weird things sometimes.Or maybe the things we do as individuals onlyseem weird to others because they don ’t know our particular quirks, preferences, and priorities. Think about it: Why do you live where you live? How did you choose your job? What makes you go back to work day after day? The answers are different for us all.Maybe we want to live close to our family. Maybe we love the city life, or our hometown is the only place we want to live. Or maybe we choose our jobs based on what pays the best, or what feels the most rewarding, or what works with raising our kids. People ’s potential motivations are myriad. And health workers are no exception.Here at theFourth Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, the motivations of health workers have been a topic of special interest, from what it takes to entice them to live and work in rural Kenya to what subtle circumstances might cause a nurse in India to refer a client away to another facility —despite having the skills and resources to treat her in the moment.The researchers, policy-makers, and global health experts assembled here in Dublin this week want to know the answers to these questions in part to help solve the vast maldistribution of health workers in countries around the world, where many —particularly specialists—tend to be clustered in cities, leaving rural or remote populations with...
Source: IntraHealth International - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Source Type: news