One piece of the puzzle to solve the human resources for health crisis

focuses on retention of health workers in rural and remote areas. Globally, half of the popula-tion lives in rural areas but they are only served by less than a quarter of all doctors and less than a third of all nurses. There-fore, providing people in rural areas with access to well trained health workers is a global challenge. It is critically important to succeed in this, particularly in the 57 low- and middle-income countries that are already plagued with critical shortages of health workers.