Providing Health Care Under Adverse Conditions: Health Personnel Performance and Individual Coping Strategies

This resulted in a collection of papers with very different viewpoints and formats, reflecting the different professional and geographical backgrounds of the participants. We have grouped them under three headings. First a set of papers describes the performance of health personnel in a number of countries and attempts to improve it. A second part looks more closely at the various coping strategies health care workers, medical and paramedical, clinical and managerial, actually apply to deal with difficult working and living conditions. A third part looks at how policy makers and technical assistance agencies deal with the predicament of health personnel – with the necessary distinction between policy and practice. [from introduction]