Publication:

Human resource challenges in community health surveys: insights from a national household survey in India

Background India with geographically diverse and malaria-endemic regions, extensive community health survey becomes essential to generate critical data for public health planning. However, their success completely relies on the team efforts of field data collectors working across socially heterogenous settings, and the institutional teams for recruiting, training and retaining the workforce. Moreover, both field workforce and recruiters face major operational, logistical, and supervisory demands while implementing such high-volume household surveys across remote terrain, dispersed settlements, and culturally diverse communities. However, the effectiveness of these human resource systems working under real-world complex conditions ultimately becomes the strength of these large-scale surveys as it requires to navigate field realities challenges while maintain the workforce retention, protocol adherence, and high data quality at this scale.

Methods A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted among the staffs working in the multi-state Indian Council of Medical Research-National Institute of Malaria Research (ICMR-NIMR) Household Survey Project surveying 37849 households across diverse geographic settings in India. Structured and pre-tested questionnaire was used to collect data. Descriptive statistics were used to summarise the key findings.

Results Across multiple malaria-endemic states, 23 field data collectors were deployed with high level of training coverage, supervision and team cohesion. Although there was extended working hours and logistical demands, 78.3% reported to complete their full contract tenure reflecting the workforce stability and strong retention.

Conclusions Overall findings suggest that in geographically and operationally complex setting with large population of 37849 households, structured human resource systems effectively sustained motivation, performance and data collection quality.