Human resource issues and its implications for health sector reforms
Abstract
Given the growing complexities and challenges the health sector faces, reforms in this sector are
inevitable. Often health sector reforms aimed to address many of these deficiencies and ensuring
effectiveness and efficiency of resource use, they focus on making the health systems responsive
through strengthening financial systems, ensuring local participation and public private partnerships,
and autonomy of health facilities. The reform process, among other things, intrinsically makes some
fundamental assumptions some of which are as follows: high organisational commitment of health
care providers, high professional commitment of health care providers, and adequate skills of health
care providers. This paper examines the commitment of district level health officials in the newly
carved out state of Chhattisgarh in India. Since development oriented HR practices (HRD) are
powerful tools to commit people working in health sector to enhance the quality of care, we believe
that health sector reforms will have to concentrate on human resource issues and practices more than
ever before in near future. The papers attempts to examine the following questions: (i) what is status
of professional commitment, organisational commitment and technical competencies of health
officials? (ii) what are the characteristics of human resource management practices in the health sector
in the state? and (iii) how these management practices are linked with professional and organisational
commitment? Finally the paper discusses the implications of these to health sector reform process
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