INTRODUCTION:

During the past half century, the focus of development of human resources for health (HRH) has evolved from increasing the numbers of conventional health personnel, through efforts to improve the education of all health workers, to current attempts to increase their effectiveness and the quality of their work. Since 1976 the official policy of the World Health Organization (WHO) has been to encourage the integration of health services with development of health personnel. This concept, known as coordinated health and human resources development, stipulates that planning, production, and management functions for HRH should be a unified process, that human resources must serve the needs of the health system, and that the health system must serve the needs of the people. A major goal of this work was to identify the important issues in HRH develop- ment as well as the factors that impede progress. Developing countries have experienced imbalances in the numbers and types of health personnel trained as well as in their function and distribution and in the quality of their training in relation to future responsibilities. Furthermore, insufficient attention to the economic aspect of HRH planning has led, in some cases, to the training of more high-level personnel (e.g., physicians) than the economy of a developed country can support. Since the cost of training a medical auxiliary is a small fraction of the cost of training a physician, improved HRH management and planning could lead to more effective allocation of human and financial resources. Among the obstacles to HRH development in many countries are misplaced priorities, lack of coherent policies and appropriate planning processes, inade-quate management capacity, poorly developed methodology, and lack of essential information. Decision makers may be overwhelmed with routine health statistics yet unaware of or unable to use results of HRH research.

CONCLUSION:

Thus there is need not only for research in this area but, more importantly, to make data from HRH studies accessible to those responsible for HRH planning. An analytic approach to HRH development should consider supply and requirement projections as well as determination of proper staffing standards and mix. Use of modelling may facilitate making HRH projections that account for interactions among many variables. Although most of the work with modelling thus far has been done in developed countries, notably the United States and Great Britain, this technique has potential applicability as a planning tool in developing countries.