Health Workforce Policy and Planning
In some countries and jurisdictions, health workforce planning is distributed among labour market participants. In others, there is an explicit policy or strategy adopted by governments and systems to plan for adequate numbers, distribution and quality of health workers to meet health care goals. For one, the International Council of Nurses reports:
The objective of HHRP is to provide the right number of health care workers with the right knowledge, skills, attitudes and qualifications, performing the right tasks in the right place at the right time to achieve the right predetermined health targets.
An essential component of planned HRH targets is supply and demand modeling, or the use of appropriate data to link population health needs and/or health care delivery targets with human resources supply, distribution and productivity. The results are intended to be used to generate evidence-based policies to guide workforce sustainability. In resource-limited countries, HRH planning approaches are often driven by the needs of targeted programmes or projects, for example those responding to the Millennium Development Goals.
The WHO Workload Indicators of Staffing Need (WISN) is an HRH planning and management tool that can be adapted to local circumstances. It provides health managers a systematic way to make staffing decisions in order to better manage their human resources, based on a health worker’s workload, with activity (time) standards applied for each workload component at a given health facility.
Read more about this topic: Health Human Resources
Famous quotes containing the words health, policy and/or planning:
“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Will mankind never learn that policy is not morality,—that it never secures any moral right, but considers merely what is expedient? chooses the available candidate,—who is invariably the devil,—and what right have his constituents to be surprised, because the devil does not behave like an angel of light? What is wanted is men, not of policy, but of probity,—who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Sensuality takes planning and work.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)