Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit: Designing Evidence-Based Incentives for Health Workers

"With its focus on self-reliance, the Rapid Retention Survey Toolkit promotes country ownership, increases self-sufficiency of country stakeholders in making and acting on health workforce decisions, and empowers stakeholders to develop evidence-based retention strategies."

First published in December 2012 and then revised in December 2014, CapacityPlus's tool is designed to help health leaders find out what motivates health workers to accept posts in rural areas - and to stay there. The toolkit builds on the World Health Organization (WHO)'s global policy recommendations for rural retention and is based on the discrete choice experiment (DCE), a research method that identifies the trade-offs that health professionals (or other types of workers) are willing to make between specific job characteristics and determines their preferences for various incentive packages, including the probability of accepting a post in a rural health facility. The toolkit guides human resources managers through a survey process to rapidly assess health professional students' and health workers' motivational preferences to accept a position and continue working in underserved facilities. It allows for rapid data-gathering and analysis, and the results can be used to create evidence-based incentive packages.

The toolkit consists of a step-by-step guide with detailed instructions for conducting a health worker retention survey using the Rapid DCE methodology, including these steps: determining the focus cadres, conducting focus groups and stakeholder discussions to select job attributes and levels, using software to develop the survey questionnaire, preparing for and conducting data collection, and analysing, interpreting, and presenting the results to stakeholders.

Also available is an associated free eLearning course, which provides step-by-step instructions on implementing the toolkit and video demonstrations of the specialised software required. The course can also serve as an advocacy tool for policymakers and other stakeholders who may be interested in learning more about the toolkit to discern if it will be appropriate for their context and health labour market.

For those in developing countries who would like to request a printed copy of the toolkit, please contact info@capacityplus.org