Assessing employment effects for the health and care workforce: a guiding framework

Overview

For policy makers, it is essential to assess the employment effects of policy interventions that increase and strengthen the health and care workforce. However, challenges exist when it comes to measuring these effects. Assessing employment of health and care workers means creating more and better job opportunities, besides also accounting for other dimensions related to the health labour market: for example, improving working conditions and understanding labour market transitions.

The guiding framework proposes a progression model for assessing and monitoring efforts aimed at facilitating health and care workforce employment. It focuses on how many health and care workers: 1. gained access to employment in health; 2. maintained and/or substantively changed their jobs; and/or 3. improved their skills or working conditions within a framework of workforce investments. All these employment effects can include indicators that can be disaggregated to account for inclusivity.

The progression model includes 3 steps: i) to identify the dimension of the employment effects related to the policy intervention, ii) to identify the level within a progressive approach, which varies from simpler to more complex ways of identifying effects on employment, iii) to identify the indicators related to the policy intervention.

The framework proposes a set of key employment indicators to assess the different dimensions of employment in health and care, in terms of the number of health and care workers who have:

1. employment in health as a result of the intervention or policy change;
2. gained additional employment in health;
3. benefited from improved working conditions;
4. benefited from increased income;
5. benefited from training; and
6. been retained

When implementing policy interventions in health and care employment, applying this framework is helpful when evaluating results, reporting and monitoring.

This is a joint WHO-ILO-OECD Working for Health document.