Why do health labour market forces matter?

Abstract

Human resources for health have been recognized as essential to the development of responsive and effective health systems. Low- and middle-income countries seeking to achieve universal health coverage face human resource constraints - whether in the form of health worker shortages, maldistribution of workers or poor worker performance - that seriously undermine their ability to achieve well-functioning health systems. Although much has been written about the human resource crisis in the health sector, labour economic frameworks have seldom been applied to analyse the situation and little is known or understood about the operation of labour markets in low- and middle-income countries. Tradit..