WHO, Human Resources for Health (www.human-resources-health.com)

and their partnering journals,

American Journal of Public Health (www.ajph.org)

Archives of Iranian Medicine (https://www.ams.ac.ir/AIM/index.html)

Croatian Medical Journal (www.cmj.hr)

Education for Health (www.educationforhealth.net)  

International Nursing Review (www.blackwellpublishing.com/inr)

Journal for Nurses in Staff Development (www.jnsdonline.com)

Leadership in Health Services (https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/mcb/211)

New Zealand Medical Journal (www.nzma.org.nz/journal)

Nursing Ethics (www.sagepub.co.uk)

Online Brazilian Journal of Nursing (www.uff.br/objnursing)

Open Medicine (www.openmedicine.ca)

Papua New Guinea Medical Journal (https://www.pngimr.org.pg/medicaljournals.htm)

PLoS Medicine (www.plosmedicine.org)

Progress in Community Health Partnerships (pchp.press.jhu.edu)

Public Health (https://intl.elsevierhealth.com/journals/pubh/)

Revista Brazileira de Educação Médica (www.educacaomedica.org.br.htm)

South African Medical Journal (www.journals.co.za/sama/m_samj.html)

Sudanese Journal of Public Health (https://www.sjph.net.sd)

are leading an international joint special issue addressing the critical need for a skilled, sustainable health workforce in the developing world.

Published articles in all the journals will fall under the broad theme.

“Towards a scaling-up of training and education for health workers”

The World Health Report 2006, Working together for health, recognized the centrality of the health workforce for the effective operation of country health systems and outlined proposals to tackle a global shortage of 4.3 million health workers. There is increasing evidence that that this shortage is interfering with efforts to achieve international development goals, including those contained in the Millenium Declaration and those of WHO’s priority programmes.

The health workforce crisis in developing countries derives principally from inadequate educational opportunities for health workers and a lack of relevance of their training to community health care practice.  Additional contributing factors include: inadequate compensation and working conditions, the deteriorating health of the workforce in many developing countries, urban/rural and workforce imbalance, and migration of the workforce from developing to developed countries.

We issued a call for manuscripts which concerned the scaling-up of training and education for health workers. Possible sub-themes will include, but are not limited to:

• private sector engagement
• regulatory frameworks for education and practice
• labour market dynamics after the production of health workers (e.g. retention)
• training teams rather than individuals
• skills mix
• multi-skilled workers, responsive to exiting needs
• task-shifting / role substitution
• competency-based education and training

Human Resources for Health is proud to launch this year-long initiative with three articles:

Human resources for maternal health: multi-purpose or specialists?

By Vincent Fauveau, Della R Sherratt, Luc de Bernis

Developing a competency-based curriculum in HIV for nursing schools in Haiti

By Elisa Knebel, Nancy Puttkammer, Adrien Demes, Ruth Devirois, Mona Prismy

Scaling up kangaroo mother care in South Africa: ‘on-site’ versus ‘off-site’ educational facilitation

By Anne-Marie Bergh, Elise Van Rooyen, Robert C Pattinson

Partnering journals will publish as best suits their format and regular schedule over the coming twelve months. Our journal will publish about three articles under the special issue theme per month.