Tool to Assess the Impact of Human Resources for Health Investments on HIV, TB and Malaria Services and Health Outcomes

Tool to Assess the Impact of Human Resources for Health Investments on HIV, TB and Malaria Services and Health Outcomes

The WHO Global strategy on human resources for health: workforce 2030 encourages development partners and global health initiatives to leverage their support to health systems in countries to sustainably strengthen the health workforce. The Global Fund makes substantial investments in HRH. In order to assess the results of the Global Fund’s catalytic investments to “incentivize use of country allocations for strategic priorities… contributing to resilient and sustainable systems for health”, a methodology was developed and pilot tested by WHO.

The tool consists of a calculator with two subsets of MS Excel files (web annexes A and B):

A. Lives saved calculator

B. Coverage target calculator

The objectives of the tool presented in this paper are to:

• estimate the health impact of HRH investments made in the context of HIV, TB and malaria programmes through their modelled effect on health service coverage of these three diseases; and
• provide aggregate indicative estimates of the range of density of health workers required to attain high coverage of selected health services.

The research questions guiding the analysis, accordingly, were the following:

• To what extent and through which pathways does investment in HRH improve health outcomes through improved coverage of HIV, TB and malaria services?
• What are the health workforce requirements to allow scaled-up coverage of HIV, TB and malaria services?