The Government collects information on the number of health workers employed in the public sector and reports on doctors, dentists and nurses registered with their respective state professional councils. In principal, this information covers the main health workers working in the public and private sectors. However, information on registered doctors, dentists and nurses from their respective state councils is likely to be inaccurate. There are several reasons for this including double counting of workers due to their being registered in more than one state, non-adjustment for health workers leaving the workforce due to death, migration and/or retirement. Further, various categories of health workers like physiotherapists, registered medical practitioners, health administrators, medical technicians and faith healers are not recorded in official statistics. In sum, the size and composition of the health workforce in the private sector, which employs the majority of health workers, is not reliably known. This has important consequences on the reliability of the information on India’s health workforce as a whole.
Recent data sources on India’s population offer an important opportunity to estimate the size of India’s health workforce and evaluate the reliability of these estimates. The overall aim of this study is to estimate various dimensions of India’s health workforce, in particular, the number, composition and geographic distribution of health workers. Three different data sources are used to derive workforce estimates - the Census 2001, the National Sample Survey (2004-05), and human resource in health estimates reported by the Government of India. The first part of this study compares mainly national level workforce estimates from these three sources. Health workforce estimates from these different sources are triangulated and evaluated. The second part of this study focuses on the geographical and sectoral distribution of the health workforce. The third part of the study explores the association between availability of health workers and key service utilization and health outcomes.
This report is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the different data sources used in this study. Section 3 provides a brief description of the methods used in estimating the size of the health workforce. Section 4 presents results from the analysis. A discussion of the results follows in Section 5. Various appendices at the end of the report provide detailed estimates of the health workforce.
