Where We Work > Asia > Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Lao People’s Democratic Republic

In Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), health workers are concentrated in cities while more than 80 percent of the population lives in rural areas. As in many countries, attracting health workers to rural posts—and retaining them—is a challenge. To determine which incentives would motivate health workers to serve and stay in rural areas, the Lao PDR Ministry of Health, in partnership with the IntraHealth-led CapacityPlus project and the World Health Organization (WHO), conducted a retention survey in May 2011 using CapacityPlus’s Rapid Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) Tool.

The Rapid DCE Tool contains step-by-step directions and sample formats that countries can adapt to carry out a retention survey specific to their context. Health workers and/or students are presented with a series of questions, each containing two sample job postings with various attributes or incentives—such as a salary of a certain amount, improved quality of the health facility, accelerated career promotion, or a housing allowance, among others—and asked to select the job they would prefer. Their choices reveal which trade-offs they’re willing to make to work in rural areas based on what they would receive—in short, which combination of incentives matters the most.

In Lao PDR, the Ministry of Health used the DCE to survey 970 health professional students and 483 health workers practicing in rural provinces to investigate their preferences for potential packages of incentives to increase recruitment and retention in the country’s rural and remote settings. The ministry is gauging the financial feasibility of the preferred incentive packages using iHRIS Retain, a retention intervention costing tool developed by CapacityPlus in collaboration with WHO. Together, the survey results and costing data will constitute key inputs to the policy-making process toward developing a national strategy to increase health worker attraction and retention.

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