It’s tough to measure progress on an issue as big and complex as the health workforce. The HRH Effort Index helps.

Despite its importance, the field of human resources for health (HRH) has lagged in developing methods to measure its status and progress in low- and middle-income countries suffering a workforce crisis. Measures of professional health worker densities and distribution are purely numerical, unreliable, and do not represent the full spectrum of workers providing health services. To provide more information on the multi-dimensional characteristics of human resources for health, in 2013–2014, the global USAID-funded CapacityPlus project, led by IntraHealth International, developed and tested a 79-item HRH Effort Index modeled after the widely used Family Planning Effort Index.

The results of applying the index in Burkina Faso, Dominican Republic, Ghana, and Mali are detailed in this article published in Human Resources for Health.