8/2/2002
Africa: Where Have All the Doctors Gone?

Question: what is the biggest threat to Africa's health? AIDS? Malaria? Tuberculosis? Well, all these are certainly present immense challenges to most developing African nations. But it emerges that there is another chronic illness that threatens to undermine all the work that is going on to raise health standards and to eradicate communicable diseases. An illness that afflicts not the people of Africa but her institutions - and principally her health services.

For there is emerging what the UN has termed a 'crisis of health manpower' that threatens to derail the continent's progress. So say the experts who last week were attending a conference sponsored by the United Nations and the World Bank, whose purpose was to address Africa's multifaceted health problems.

The World Health Organisation (WHO), leading for the UN, reported that Africa's health care facilities were "barely able to function for lack of qualified, motivated doctors, nurses and other health workers." Never mind the medicines, there are no doctors.

AIDS has taken its toll in the hospitals as much as on the farms and in the factories while at the same time increasing substantially the demand for care. That is one reason for the staffing problem. But another insidious reason is the demand for trained health workers in developed countries.

Dr.Ok Pannenborg, who oversees the World Bank's work on health in Africa, blames the lack of African doctors and nurses on the increasingly flexible labour market that facilitates the migration of skilled manpower to other countries. Recently, say WHO, one European country recruited an entire graduating nursing class from one African country to bolster its own health service.

"Without urgent action there is a risk that the contributions soon to be committed in Africa by the new Global Fund to combat AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria will not even have a serious possibility of achieving their goals," the agency are warning.

The conference agreed that there was a need for more suitable training programmes and better co-operation among the many parties concerned.