Definition and importance of the health workforce

Definition and importance of

the health workforce

According to WHO, human resources for health

(HRH) are the men and women who make health

care happen. They include nurses and midwives, pharmacists, physicians, dentists and other health

professionals. They also include auxiliary health care workers, community health workers,

practitioners of traditional medicine, technicians and other

paraprofessional personnel (1).They are

important because the existence and quality of services to promote health, prevent illness or to cure

and rehabilitate depend on the knowledge, skills and motivation of

human resources for health.

Countries must ensure that their health systems get the right number of service providers with the

right skills to the right place at the right time. They

must also ensure that the service providers operate

within an environment that enables them to adhere

to internationally accepted and nationally adapted

standards of care, thus assuring services of good quality.

There are a range of indicators to measure the human resources capacity in a country’s health services

system. The principal indicator is the proportion of health workers to the total population. Because

occupational classifications are country-specific

and the method for counting these workers has not

been standardized, it has been difficult to compare

HRH capacities across countries. For this reason,

traditionally key cadres such as doctors and nurses have been used

to estimate the HRH capacities.

With the advent of HIV/AIDS, other cadres crucial to

the delivery of care and treatment services, such

as counselors, have become very important. Home-based care has placed a large burden for care and

treatment, including psychosocial and nutritional supp

ort (both crucial to adherence and effectiveness

of care and treatment), on the family and on community health workers (CHWs). The ratios of family, CHWs, and traditional cadres of providers to the general population and to the population of clients

seeking facility-based services would give a better

indication of the HRH capacity of the country’s

health system. Accurate measurements of these populations are not always available (2).