Africa Hard Hit by Health Worker Gap
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Deploying workers like [Charity] Kiconco trained in key tasks but without the range of qualifications of a nurse or doctor is one way of addressing a global health care shortage that is hitting African and other developing nations hardest.
Experts gathered in Uganda this week to discuss the problem also considered asking rich countries—which often benefit from the migration of health care workers—to compensate poorer nations for the staff they recruit and to pay to train health workers in the developing world.
The long-term goal, though, was galvanizing the funding and political will to radically expand the education and training of health workers in the developed and developing world.
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 4 million more health workers are needed worldwide to improve health systems and achieve international health and development goals. The gap is felt keenly in Africa, which carries 25 percent of the global disease burden yet has only 3 percent of the world’s health workers and 1 percent of its economic resources.
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[Miriam Were, the head of the African Medical and Research Foundation] previously worked as a teacher in Kenya but switched to medicine when she saw how many of her students missed classes due to preventable illnesses like diarrhea and malaria.
More typically, though, the movement is not from teaching to medicine, but out of Africa. For overworked and underpaid workers in developing countries, migration is often an appealing option.
The Global Health Workforce Alliance—organizers of this week’s conference in Uganda—says a physician in sub-Saharan Africa or Asia might earn only $100 per month, but could earn $14,000 monthly in some developed countries. One in four doctors trained in sub-Saharan Africa works in a developing country.
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According to figures published in the British medical journal The Lancet, the U.S. has 9.37 nurses per 1,000 people and Uganda has just 0.55. But even the United States is facing a shortage, according to organizers of the Uganda conference, needing 800,000 nurses and 200,000 doctors.
“Better working conditions at home would be a massive factor in mitigating migration but these countries don’t have money,” said Dr. Francis Omaswa, executive director of the Global Health Workforce Alliance. Rich countries should invest in training, he said, “so that we have a big enough pool of health workers to share between all of us.”
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(Posted on March 7, 2008)
Comments
Experts gathered in Uganda this week to discuss the problem also considered asking rich countries—which often benefit from the migration of health care workers—to compensate poorer nations for the staff they recruit and to pay to train health workers in the developing world.
How about keeping the health care workers of poorer countries in poorer countries to begin with? If richer countries are taking from poorer countries, the best way to solve the problem is not to take to begin with.
Posted by St. Louis CofCC Blogmeister at 6:36 PM on March 7
Tell the UN to suppply them with capable doctors! Have the UN actually do something useful for a change! They are always complaining about something needing to be done in Africa.
Posted by jenbelievesinwhites at 7:41 PM on March 7
Why should the West AGAIN be expected to foot the bill to retain doctors in Africa? In reference to one of the posting, the West shouldn’t accept African doctors because we don’t need more 3rd worlders creating competition for Western doctors. The main problem for me is that African countries get billions in aid, they have plenty of money to pay their doctors better. Instead, the money is lost to African dictators, incompetence, and corruption. There really isn’t any point to send those people money. Naturally, African doctors want to leave, who would want to stay in that hell hole. That’s why we must reject them as immigrants. Once we do that maybe these African countries will feel greater pressure to pay these doctors more. Throwing more money at them solves nothing. Its like throwing money at a spoiled 12 year old teenager. Looking at blacks’ behavior in regard to spending and saving (spending thousands on some gold chain and rims, when their kids don’t have school supplies) and responsibility (look at crime rates) I really do believe in all seriousness that most blacks have the mindset and mental capacity of adolescent children.
Posted by New Yorker at 10:31 PM on March 7
Simply put, a foreign doctor should not be able to work anywhere except his own country. We are not going to create a global pool of health professionals “to share between all of us”.
Posted by at 11:17 PM on March 7
I wonder why health administrators in the “poaching” countries such as the USA, UK and Canada haven’t yet hit on the radical idea of, oh, actually doing a better job training our own citizens for nursing and doctor jobs? If there is such a shortage, then maybe it’d be a better idea to train our own citizens rather than half-assing it by importing people abroad.
In hospitals throughout much of the West, most of the nurses are Filipino. While they work hard, they don’t have the background and that kind of innate communication ability that people within a particular culture and country have for each other. So both sides get a lousy deal— we’re stuck with people we have to retrain, who just don’t get the nuances of language and culture that are critical for communication, while the Philippines and African countries lose the healthcare workers they desperately need to retain.
Also, any feminist who *ever* trashes the profession of nursing should be publicly chastised and humiliated. Part of the reason we’ve been having trouble opening new nursing schools, is that feminists have succeeded in demonizing the whole profession. It’s one of the most honorable, challenging and respectful professions anywhere, and we should be doing our utmost to ensure that we train enough of our own people to go into this profession.
Posted by Reese at 4:53 AM on March 8
Doctors are immigrating to the West? Fine with me. Better than what else is coming across the border. Were I African, and I had an oppotunity for a medical career in the United States as opposed to say, Rwanda…well no kidding.
Before anything else, Africa needs political stability. Then comes economic stability and education. Talking about anything before that is a waste of time.
Posted by at 6:31 AM on March 8
Actually, we do. US medical schools, with their long residency programs, only train about 75 percent of the doctors needed by the healthcare system. Most african immigrants from the professional class speak heavily accented english, but they’re nothing like the ghetto underclass already in the US, and most non-Caribbean African professionals have nothing but contempt for them.
Posted by at 6:56 AM on March 8
The fact remains that Africans and Indians who choose the vocation of the Medical Doctor would rather let their own kind suffer and die in pain and anguish, in order to fatten their own wallets in England or the USA.
I’m afraid I’m not familiar with the wording of the Hippocratic oath, and am well aware that, realistically, doctors seek prosperity just like the rest of us, but the vocation of the Doctor was traditionally placed alongside that of the priest in terms of the sense of ‘duty’ and ‘service’ to his fellow men, so, therefore the cupidity and ruthlessness shown by African and Indian doctors to their own kith and kin leaves a ‘nasty taste in the mouth’.
Posted by Kenelm Digby at 7:56 AM on March 8
“Before anything else, Africa needs political stability. Then comes economic stability and education. Talking about anything before that is a waste of time.”
Yes, but what comes before political stability? In the USA it was culture, leadership, faith in god, education, the church, and of course, race.
As far as I can see Africa has a useless culture, primitive religions, 3rd rate education and is run by and for a race that may lack the intellectual capacity for western style of governance. So to say they need political stability before economic development is all well and good but I see little chance of them developing it.
Even many Africans now see that colonialism was the best thing that ever happened to them. (Particularly the less abusive native white colonialist like those in Rhodesia, the less said about the Belgians the better.) While their pride won’t allow them to admit that except in private after a few drinks, many know and understand it.
Posted by Zane at 10:58 AM on March 8
NO health care worker educated in Africa should be allowed to practice in the United States anyway. The quality of education is not and never will be the same.
Africans seem to have a completely different concept of health care than Americans. Take for example the Minister of Health in South Africa suggesting the best cure for AIDs is drinking beet juice. I thought the best cure for AIDs was WEARING CONDOMS.
As far as the UN suggesting that the West should pay to train African health care workers: Is there no limit to their ‘creative financing’ philanthropic schemes to get Americans to subsidize African dysfunctionality?
Posted by at 1:40 PM on March 8
The fact remains that Africans and Indians who choose the vocation of the Medical Doctor would rather let their own kind suffer and die in pain and anguish, in order to fatten their own wallets in England or the USA.
Posted by Kenelm Digby at 7:56 AM on March 8
$$$$$$$$$$$$$
Well, Mr Digby, how have you been ‘giving back’ to lower class whites then? And if a white doctor came from, say, Brazil which is 53% white to the US, is he exempt from your amazing grace?
Posted by mensarefugee at 6:28 PM on March 8
Economists have been screaming this for decades. As long as the West continues to sheep-steal every Third World person of above-average intelligence, they will never be able to take care of their own country. Economists call it the “brain drain” and it is the basis of the H1-B visa program, so that people like Bill Gates can snatch up every bright person he can find and bring them to the US to work for Microsoft. Third World countries will NEVER be anything BUT Third World countries as long as North America and Europe allow many of the engineers, doctors, technicians, teachers, and the like to immigrate. It is a bad policy for our own young people to be forced to compete with some of the brightest people in the world in order to get into a good school and get a job. It is equally bad to allow bright foreigners to stay in this country, rather than go home and make their own country a better place to live.
Why does anyone need to immigrate to the USA or Europe as long as we have high speed internet, video cams, faxes, scanners, telephones, and cheap airline travel?? It is no longer necessary to come to this country to work here, we all know that. So let’s stop the nonsense of unlimited immigration, regardless of skills, regardless of intelligence, regardless of family ties.
Posted by Memphomaniac at 1:00 AM on March 9
Mensarefugee,
I’m simply stating the facts of the case as they are.
the point is that Third World doctors make the entirely rational (but perhaps unethical) decision to chase after big money treating patients of an different race whilst necessarily letting their own genetic kin suffer and die horribly as they thus denied of their medical expertise as a direct result.
Strangely enough, the central tenet of the medical profession is to ‘heal the sick’ and to enrich oneself is supposedly the secondary consideration.
It is unfortunate that this very important reason why Third Worlders suffer and die is ignored and ‘swept under the carpet’, and as ever the blame and opprobrium is heaped on Whites.
Posted by Kenelm Digby at 7:54 AM on March 9
A true liebral would not care where the doctors come from. We are all individuals, seeking maximum fulfillment however we can. In fact that is the reason they welcome everyone to America.
Yet they treat black African doctors as some sort of natural resource.
It is this sense liberals have that African doctors are the property of Africa that leads them to go against their individualistic liberal principles.
So let us use their racial solidarity against them.
No amount of money can substitute for a lack of doctors, so their first suggestion — that white European people pour more money on the Africans to make up for “stealing” their doctors is a non-starter.
What we need to do is ban the importation of African doctors and nurses … and Pakis and Indians, too.
We make the argument that we are willing to “suffer” without them to show our wonderful solidarity and support with the neglected people in Africa.
Likewise, when Jesse Jackson marches in Chicago and calls for boycotts of gun dealers who sell to black people, we support his cause and ask for laws that prevent black folks from buying guns.
We preach disarming black folks and kicking foreign doctors and nurses out of our country and we are liberal heroes.
Posted by Big Bill at 4:59 PM on March 9
Why should this nation import foreign doctors who have not been trained to our standards, and do not necessarily share the same degree of professionalism that is promoted by American medical schools? I don’t want them here.
Note that in the recent medical scandal in Las Vegas, the first clinic to be shut down (for reusing needles, among other things) was run by four doctors from….who knows where? Two of them, at least, are Indians. Any bets as to the nationalities of the other doctors involved?
Well, why would we expect them to run their medical clinics any differently than they run their Subway sandwich shops, or motels. Provide the customers with shoddy service, and save a few pennies. After all, the patients are only foreigners (i.e., Americans).
Posted by CSinAL at 2:14 AM on March 10
It’s not hard to see why; that place is a mess. Hyperinflation, such as that created by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe hits working professionals the hardest. They live on fixed incomes, and see their purchasing power driven through the floor as prices climb.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 2:43 PM on March 10