Health manpower employment and productivity in the Philippines

Abstract

The study analyzes two of the major issues which emerged in health manpower planning and development exercises in the Philippines, namely, employment and productivity of specific categories of health manpower in the country's health delivery system. The first issue involves the critical questions of supply of, and needs or requirements for, specific health manpower in the country's health care delivery system. The second issue, meanwhile, emerged because of lack of certain types of health personnel as well as the rapid increase in the cost of medical care. These two issues evolved from the nagging concern over the maldistribution of health personnel and the existence of imbalances between what and how many of specific types of health manpower are needed and available in the country. The study covers only fourtypes of health professionals: physicians, nurses, midwives and dentists. This study is organized as follows. The next section discusses the supply of health manpower in the country. This includes a discussion of the estimates of actual supply as of 1987, their employment characteristics in terms of employment settings and their regional distribution. An attempt to forecast the supply of health manpower up to the year 2000 is made. The study also examines the factors which influence the location decisions of these health workers. Additional issues on supply such as production, utilization and migration are also discussed. The third section focuses on the needs of health manpower with a discussion on how to estimate or project the needs or requirements of health manpower. The fourth section discusses estimation of the needs of health manpower using the different methodologies. These estimates are then compared with supply to identify shortages or surpluses. Adiscussion of demand for health manpower is presented in Section 5. Although no actual estimation of demand equations are made due to insufficient data, several conceptual and methodological issues are discussed. Section 6 presents various productivity issues. Finally, section 7 concludes the study with some policy recommendations.