From: Human resource management in post-conflict health systems: review of research and knowledge gaps
HRM functional area/topic area | Areas for future research | Rationale |
---|---|---|
Workforce supply | ||
Recruitment and selection | ● Strategies to assess health workers’ knowledge and skills to facilitate their reintegration into the public health workforce | ● Appropriateness of skills of reintegrated health workers is often overlooked |
● Implementation of ‘basic’ HR data systems at an early stage, which can be further developed | ● Important to support workforce distribution and performance | |
● Equal opportunities including gender-equitable and ethnically sensitive policies to recruit and support health workers in conflict-affected areas | ● Evidence on gender-equitable and ethnically sensitive policies is lacking | |
Pay | ● How to implement pay reforms effectively under new post-conflict leadership and governance while minimising unintended consequences for the health workforce and wider health system | ● Post-conflict pay reforms risk failing to meet their intended objectives of attracting, motivating and retaining health workers |
Pre-service education and training | ● Sustainable strategies and policies to attract, train and support qualified trainers and educators after conflict | ● Lack of qualified trainers and educators undermines rapid scale-up strategies |
Workforce distribution | ||
Deployment | ● Opportunities for strengthening governance and administration of deployment in the crucial post-conflict moment and ensuring linkages with training | ● Weak governance creates scope for interference in deployment; lack of evidence on administrative systems for deployment; deployment and training systems become unlinked during conflict |
● Financial and non-financial incentives to attract and retain health workers in rural and conflict-affected areas within a competitive incentive environment | ● Large influx of non-state employers post-conflict offering attractive salaries and increasing the competition for skilled health workers; conflict-affected rural areas particularly unattractive | |
Workforce performance | ||
Work organisation and job design | ● Approaches to reviewing overall workloads and reallocating work to different cadres to address near-term shortages, but which support longer-term planning | ● Few published studies addressing work reorganisation and job redesign at different stages post-conflict |
● Unintended consequences of task shifting on health workers, service provision and utilisation, and the wider health system | ● Longer-term effects of formal and informal task shifting are unknown | |
● Use of coordinated stakeholder approach to develop interim job descriptions | ● Job descriptions may have become irrelevant during conflict; NGO-introduced job descriptions proliferate after conflict and are often uncoordinated | |
Management and supervision | ● Interventions to support health workers affected by conflict to perform well and contribute to safe and effective service delivery | ● Health workers targeted during violent conflict may need psychosocial support, but managers may be untrained and themselves affected by conflict |
Performance appraisal | Development of basic performance appraisal systems that could be advanced as HRM systems become more formalised and governance strengthened | ● Very limited evidence on performance appraisal in post-conflict settings |
Performance-related incentives | ● Understanding the impact of financial and non-financial incentives on different facets of performance (e.g. productivity, competence, availability) in changing employment contexts | ● Incentives used by NGOs in the immediate post-conflict period may impact on the ability of public sector employers to use comparable incentives in the longer term |
In-service training | ● Understanding how wider health system factors can facilitate or constrain efforts to scale-up in-service training interventions after conflict | ● Inadequate funding, lack of supplies and equipment, poor working conditions etc. hinder effective provision of new or upgraded skills |