In the adjusted analyses we controlled for quality improvement initiatives (participation in HRSA health disparities collaborative project, overall measure of support for QI); workforce (physician vacancies, nurse vacancies); and usual source of care.
The period since the mid 1990s has been one of workforce redundancy, vacancy freezes, shortages and cuts in education and provision of training in the public sector [ 2].
Red: perceived current shortage - expressed service demand in excess of existing workforce, ongoing vacancies exist, difficult/unable to fill positions, and extended waiting times.
Thirdly, model outputs were cast in terms of workforce impacts (numbers, vacancy rates, supply shortages).
Special recruitment and retention issues are challenging the public health laboratory workforce, including increasing vacancy rates and an increasing demand for skilled workers in light of the Select Agent Rule.
Concerns have been raised, however, as to where the large numbers of additional health professionals needed for public sector ART will come from in light of the international brain drain, unequal geographical and sectoral distributions of the health workforce, and high vacancy and turnover rates in the public health sector [ 8- 12].
For example, as outlined above, the model described here highlighted the implications of current policies and demonstrated that continuation of current policies would lead to significant shortfalls in the care workforce and high vacancy rates, with the implication that the status quo was not a viable long-term option.
Retaining nurses within specialty areas has workforce implications when vacancies are unable to be filled by appropriately experienced staff.
We briefly describe the country context and we use official data from 2008 to analyse various dimensions of the health workforce, such as vacancies, attrition, and geographical imbalances.
Other complementary indicators for assessing equity in the health workforce include distributions of vacancy rates, turnover rates and relative wage rates by location (or other criteria).
