Africa needs a million more health care workers, a report Says. Africa needs to nearly triple the number of its health workers if it is to reverse plummeting life expectancies and combat pandemics of disease, a research group of more than 100 scholars and experts said in a report released Friday, according to the World Bank press review.
So far, the global health debate has focused on lowering prices for AIDS drugs and increasing financial aid from wealthy countries. But money and drugs will fail unless poor countries have enough people to tend the sick, according to the research group, the Joint Learning Initiative, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among others.
The academics, health officials and other specialists in the Joint Learning Initiative said rich countries must take steps to slow what the report calls “fatal flows” of nurses and doctors from poor African countries to Europe and North America.
By the groups calculations, Africa needs a million more health workers.
Wealthy nations must educate enough of their own nationals, the group says, rather than rely on doctors and nurses whose training has been paid for by African countries that are losing the fight against disease.
The African Union estimates that poor countries subsidize rich ones with 500 million US dollar a year through the migration of health workers.
Furthermore, the report found that there are more Malawian doctors in Manchester, England alone than in whole Malawi, and that only 50 of the 600 doctors trained in Zambia since that countrys independence in 1964 have stayed.
Experts estimate that countries need at least one health worker for every 400 people, but about 75 countries, with 2,5 billion people, fall below that minimum threshold, the report found.
In Uganda, for example, there is only one nurse or midwife for every about 11.000 people, while Liberia and Haiti have one per 10.000.
Shortages are most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV medications sometimes exist, but hardly anyone is available to distribute them.
About 1 million new health workers – triple the current number – are needed immediately in sub-Saharan Africa to boost collapsing health systems, the scientists found.
Overall, 4 million new health workers are needed to meet the minimum health goals set by the United Nations at the turn of the millennium, the report says. – It is people, not just vaccines and drugs, who prevent disease and administer cures, the report said.
The report is the result of two years of analysis by the Joint Learning Initiative — a consortium of more than 100 health leaders worldwide sponsored by the World Bank, World Health Organization and private charities.
Kilde: www.worldbank.org
