This study of personnel in local health departments (LHDs) focused on two predominantly rural states: Idaho and Wyoming. Although in the same region of the country, the structure of local public health is different in each state. Idaho's regionalized LHDs are relatively autonomous, whereas Wyoming's are county based, with many public health functions retained at the state level. The majority of...

When you are ill and consult a physician for his or her expertise, many times laboratory testing is part of the clinical workup. This testing is critical to the physician's ability to diagnose the patient's condition. What if testing was not available … because there was no one to do the testing? Although seemingly far-fetched, this scenario could play itself out in the next ten years due to an...

The World Health Organization and others recognize interprofessional collaboration as an effective strategy toward mitigating the global health workforce crisis. The authors describe challenges to developing sustainable interprofessional education and practice programs and suggest a framework to address them.

This paper examines two innovative educational initiatives for the Ecuadorian public health workforce: a Canadian-funded Masters programme in ecosystem approaches to health that focuses on building capacity to manage environmental health risks sustainably; and the training of Ecuadorians at the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba (known as Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina in Spanish). ...

BACKGROUND Optimising retention of rural and remote primary healthcare (PHC) workers requires workforce planners to understand what constitutes a reasonable length of employment and how this varies. Currently, knowledge of retention patterns is limited and there is an absence of PHC workforce benchmarks that take account of differences in geographic context and profession. METHODS Three broad...

INTRODUCTION Forecasting the demand and supply of health manpower in an accurate manner makes appropriate planning possible. The aim of this paper was to review approaches and methods for health manpower forecasting and consequently propose the features that improve the effectiveness of this important process of health manpower planning. METHODS A literature review was conducted for studies p...

Sally Murray is an associate editor of Open Medicine.

Despite many advances in contraceptive care, little progress has been made in reducing the unacceptably high rate of unintended pregnancy in the United States, even though the Department of Health and Human Services identified reduction of these rates as a key public health priority since 1990. Health disparities are still a major challenge in the US, with the highest rates of unintended pregna...