Experiences Using Technology for Estimating Workforce Resource Requirements

Human resources for health (HRH) represent the largest cost element in providing health services in low income countries. Yet, there is limited information on the costs associated with training, hiring, retaining, deploying and managing HRH.

The Resource Requirement Tool (RRT) was developed to help countries estimate and project the costs and expenditures necessary for scaling up the education and employment of the health work force. RRT is an easy to use excel-based technology that enables countries to

estimate and project the resources required for meeting their HRH plans; analyze the plans' affordability; simulate “what if” scenarios; facilitate the monitoring of scale up plans; and contribute to the development of the costing components of Human Resource Management Information Systems. The RRT has three modules: 1) Employment, which estimates cost of recruiting,

employing, retaining and deploying countries' health workforce. It also takes stock of countries' private sector HRH and forecasts the demand for HRH in the private sector; 2) Pre-service training (PST), which estimates the cost and expenditures associated with scaling up countries' pre-service training capacity. It also takes stock of countries' private sector PST capacity; (3) Affordability, which estimates countries' resource needs and compares it against the resource availability. Users of the RRT are guided through the modules and prompted to fill out employment and PST data in specific places. The tool then estimates and projects the employment,

PST and affordability outputs. Thus far, the tool was used in Liberia, Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda, Mozambique, and the Philippines by each countries' respective Ministries of Health in collaboration with various development partners including the World Bank, DFID and USAID. The RRT was developed by the Financing Taskforce (FTF) of the Global Health Workforce Alliance (GHWA) at the World Health Organization (WHO).