Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Health Workers

CapacityPlus announces a revised edition of the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit: Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Health Workers, which helps countries determine what motivates health workers to accept and remain in rural posts.

The toolkit is based on the discrete choice experiment, a powerful research method that identifies the trade-offs health professionals are willing to make between specific job characteristics and determines their preferences for various incentive packages. The toolkit guides human resources managers to rapidly assess health professional students’ and health workers’ motivational preferences to accept a position and continue working in underserved facilities. The results can be used to create evidence-based incentive packages that are appropriate within a country’s health labor market.

The toolkit includes step-by-step instructions, sample formats, and examples that can easily be adapted. This new version contains improvements based on application in Namibia among pharmacists and pharmacy assistants.