Striking the right balance: health workforce retention in remote and rural areas

Ensuring universal access to skilled, mo-tivated and supported health workers, especially in remote and rural communi-ties, is a necessary condition for realizing the human right to health, a matter of social justice. It is also at the core of each and every global health goal – the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, primary health care, immunization, and control of HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuber-culosis. For none of these goals is attainable if significant population groups are denied access to health workers.Despite recent increased rhetoric, human resources remain a sorely neglected and grossly under-financed engine for health improvement. That is why 1500 global health leaders issued the Kampala Declaration in 2008: “to assure adequate incentives and an enabling and safe envi-ronment for effective retention and equi-table distribution of the health workforce”.