Health Professional Education Market Assessment

Project Details

Development of tools and methodologies to guide analysis of the market for health professional education

A responsive and efficient health workforce is critical to meeting the health needs of the population, both now and into the future. Many low and middle income countries continue to struggle with health workforce issues such as over-supply, under-supply or maldistribution of health workers. The processes by which candidates to health professional studies are selected, are educated and then enter into the workforce are important determinants of the number of professionals produced and of the functioning of a health services system. Efforts to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the health professional education system are challenged, particularly in low and middle income countries, by a limited understanding of the factors which shape the health professional education market, and there is limited guidance available on how to undertake an analysis of this market.

This work seeks to address a gap by developing tools and outlining methodologies that can be used to support analysis of the market for health professional education. Our work has achieved the following:

• developed a theory of change model for conducting an analysis of the health professional education market, to illustrate the outcomes of analysis and potential downstream impacts on the health system as a whole.
• articulated the concepts of supply, demand and rate of return on investment in the context of the health professional education market.
• described methodologies that can be used to analyse this market, and highlighted considerations and challenges that will influence how these analyses can be applied to low and middle income country settings.

Researchers

Professor Barbara McPake
Andrea Boudville
Dr Tori Oliver

Funding

This work was funded through the Libya Health Sector Support Grant program between the World Bank and Libya