4 July 2008
Addis Ababa — U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals are meant to be reached 2015 when there is supposed to be enough doctors to meet overall global needs, but Ethiopia has been rated as one of the countries to still be far short in that regard, World Health Organisation (WHO) experts said on Wednesday.
In the latest WHO bulletin, researchers from the U.N. agency and the University of California said there is now a shortage of 2.3 million physicians, nurses and midwives worldwide, with the biggest shortfall in sub-Saharan Africa.
Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria are other countries in the Sub-Shara said to be not to meet the MDGs.
"International aid to Africa should be used to boost doctors' salaries and bolster the recruitment and training of medical staff," the experts said.
Africa is likely to be short about 167,000 physicians in 2015, the bulletin says, citing the economic and demographic projections by study authors Richard Scheffler, Jenny Liu, Ethiopian Yohannes Kinfu and Mario Dal Poz.
"Given the disproportionate burden of disease in this region, policies for increasing the supply of physicians are urgently needed to stem projected shortages," they said.
"Government and donor organisations should consider increasing financial support of health-care workers as a means of improving recruitment and retention." It said efforts to connect African hospitals with laboratories and experts abroad through the Internet and phone, known as "telemedicine," may also help ease cost pressures in countries that lack skilled medical personnel, the report concluded.
More than 13,000 doctors trained in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to be practicing in Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia, having been lured by better pay, legal assistance with immigration and moving expenses.
A team of international disease experts said in a Lancet medical journal article earlier this year that such poaching of African health workers, including nurses and pharmacists, should be viewed as a crime.
The U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals, adopted in 2000, include reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases that remain most prevalent in Africa.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Daily Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
