Nguyen, MP, Mirzoev, T orcid.org/0000-0003-2959-9187 and Le, TM (2016) Contribution of health workforce to health outcomes: empirical evidence from Vietnam. Human Resources for Health, 14 (1). 68. ISSN 1478-4491
Abstract
Background: In Vietnam, a lower-middle income country, while the overall skill- and knowledge-based quality of health workforce is improving, health workers are disproportionately distributed across different economic regions. A similar trend appears to be in relation to health outcomes between those regions. It is unclear, however, whether there is any relationship between the distribution of health workers and the achievement of health outcomes in the context of Vietnam. This study examines the statistical relationship between the availability of health workers and health outcomes across the different economic regions in Vietnam. Methods: We constructed a panel data of six economic regions covering 8 years (2006–2013) and used principal components analysis regressions to estimate the impact of health workforce on health outcomes. The dependent variables representing the outcomes included life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, and under-five mortality rates. Besides the health workforce as our target explanatory variable, we also controlled for key demographic factors including regional income per capita, poverty rate, illiteracy rate, and population density. Results: The numbers of doctors, nurses, midwives, and pharmacists have been rising in the country over the last decade. However, there are notable differences across the different categories. For example, while the numbers of nurses increased considerably between 2006 and 2013, the number of pharmacists slightly decreased between 2011 and 2013. We found statistically significant evidence of the impact of density of doctors, nurses, midwives, and pharmacists on improvement to life expectancy and reduction of infant and under-five mortality rates. Conclusions: Availability of different categories of health workforce can positively contribute to improvements in health outcomes and ultimately extend the life expectancy of populations. Therefore, increasing investment into more equitable distribution of four main categories of health workforce (doctors, nurses, midwives, and pharmacists) can be an important strategy for improving health outcomes in Vietnam and other similar contexts. Future interventions will also need to consider an integrated approach, building on the link between the health and the development.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2016 The Author(s). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. |
Keywords: | Asia; Health outcomes; Health workforce; Human resources for health; Infant mortality; Life expectancy; Under-five mortality; Vietnam |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Medicine and Health (Leeds) > School of Medicine (Leeds) > Leeds Institute of Health Sciences (Leeds) > Nuffield Centre for International Health and Development (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number EU - European Union 222970 EU - European Union 222970 EU - European Union 222970 World Health Organisation 201170399 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 23 Nov 2016 10:40 |
Last Modified: | 05 Oct 2017 16:22 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-016-0165-0 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | BioMed Central |
Identification Number: | 10.1186/s12960-016-0165-0 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:108110 |