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When government health services in Papua New Guinea (PNG) were decentralized to the 19 provinces in the early 1980s, no generally accepted staffing standards existed. There were major staffing inequities between provinces which the department of health could do nothing to redress, since it no longer retained a direct role in decisions on. provincial health budgets and staffing. The department of health continued to seek such a role. However, before it could effectively contribute to resource allocation decisions, it needed an objective method of identifying and quantifying staffing requirements and inequities. A methodology called ‘indicators of staffing need’ (ISN) was developed to assess the staffing requirements for health ser vices and hence the equity of sthff deployment. This paper describes the development of the ISN methodology. The methodology consists of identifying the major components of a health worker's job, estimating the standard workload for that job (that is, the amount of work which one person in the job could do in a year), and then using the workload standards and the service statistics to derive the recommended number of staff for a health activity or facility. Examples are given from the analyses of rural and hospital nurses, pharmacy personnel and doctors, and the main methodological difficulties are discussed. The ISN methodology has been designed as a managerial tool, which offers - using data already available - a direct comparison of staffing between provinces, districts and individual health facilities. It was incorporated into the PNG government's budgetary and resource allocation system in 1989.
Kolehmainen‐Aitken et al. (Mon,) studied this question.