Using recruitment and selection to build a primary care workforce for the future

ABSTRACT

Recruitment and selection are critical components of human resource management. They influence both the quantity and quality of the healthcare workforce. In this article, we use two different examples of primary care workers, General Practitioners in the UK and Community Health Workers in low- and middle- income countries, to illustrate how recruitment and selection are, and could be, used to enhance the primary care workforce in each setting. Both recruitment and selection can be costly, so when funding is limited, decisions on how to spend the human resources budget must be made. It could be argued that human resource management should focus on recruitment in a seller’s market (an insufficient supply of applicants) and on selection in a buyer’s market (sufficient applicants but concerns about their quality). We use this article to examine recruitment and selection in each type of market and highlight the interactions between these two human resource management decisions. Recruitment and selection, we argue, must be considered in both types of market; particularly in sectors where workers’ labour impacts upon population health. We note the paucity of high-quality research in recruitment and selection for primary care and the need for rigorous study designs such as randomised trials.

KEYWORDS:

• General practice
• community health workers
• selection
• recruitment
• primary care

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

CB and RL are investigators on a MRC Public Health Intervention Development grant [MR/N000999/1] to develop a selection tool for CHWs in sub-Saharan Africa. This grant is jointly funded by the UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and the UK Department for International Development (DFID) under the MRC/DFID Concordat agreement. CB and RL are supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care – West Midlands (NIHR CLAHRC WM). The views expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NHS, the NIHR, or the Department of Health and Social Care.