Attracting Doctors and Medical Students to Rural Vietnam : Insights from a Discrete Choice Experiment
Persuading medical doctors to work in rural areas is one of the main challenges facing health policy makers, in both developing and developed countries. Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) have increasingly been used to analyze the preferences of he...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2010/12/13246400/attracting-doctors-medical-students-rural-vietnam-insights-discrete-choice-experiment http://hdl.handle.net/10986/13596 |
| Summary: | Persuading medical doctors to work in
rural areas is one of the main challenges facing health
policy makers, in both developing and developed countries.
Discrete Choice Experiments (DCEs) have increasingly been
used to analyze the preferences of health workers, and how
they would respond to alternative incentives associated with
working in a rural location. Previous DCE studies focusing
on the rural recruitment and retention problem have sampled
either in-service health workers or students in the final
year of their training program. This study is the first to
sample both of these groups in the same setting. It carry
out a DCE to compare how doctors and final-year medical
students in Vietnam value six job attributes, and use the
results to simulate the impact of alternative incentive
packages on recruitment in rural areas. Results show
significant differences between the two groups. The location
of workplace (rural or urban) was by far the most important
attribute for doctors; for medical students it was long-term
education. More surprising, however, was the magnitude of
the differences: there was fivefold difference in
willingness-to-pay estimates for some job attributes. These
differences strongly suggest that policy makers in Vietnam
should consider moving away from the current uniform
approach to rectifying rural shortages and tailor separate
incentive packages to students and doctors. The results also
suggest that future DCE studies should carefully consider
the choice of sample if results are to be used for policy making. |
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