Study says millions of health workers needed
Four million additional health care workers are needed over the next decade worldwide to abate potential health crises around the globe and especially in sub-Saharan Africa, where potential pandemic conditions loom, according to an analysis published Saturday.
A consortium of more than 100 physicians and other experts examined the state-of-the-globe’s public health and found that a shortage of health care workers is growing.
The team reported that skilled doctors and nurses from poor countries are fleeing by the thousands to better working conditions in wealthier nations. And in rich countries, skilled health care workers continue to flee rural areas for the cities, leaving a gap where people are in need.
Most nations faring worst are in sub-Saharan Africa, which has been ravaged by infectious diseases and where few skilled workers remain to treat the sick. One million such workers are needed immediately to beat back AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis, according to the report in The Lancet medical journal.
“It’s scary,” said Dr. Lincoln Chen, an author of the report and the director of the Global Equity Center at Harvard University. “Over the last 100 years we have never had anything like this: 20 countries are actually losing life expectancy, mostly because of HIV-AIDS.”
Other regions in desperate need include Eastern Europe, parts of Southeast Asia and impoverished regions of the Caribbean, particularly Haiti.
Yet an imbalance of care, Chen said, caused by a brain drain is taking the greatest toll. He and his colleagues suggest that rich nations beef up the training of their health care workers to fill in staffing gaps.
Indeed, there are more doctors from Malawi practicing in Manchester, England, the analysis found, than in all of Malawi. And of the estimated 600 physicians trained in Zambia in recent years, 550 practice in industrialized countries. Several African nations earlier this year asked for compensation as a result of the brain drain, saying they subsidize rich countries through health care worker migration.
The report suggests that Western health care workers can train people in poor countries who practice traditional medicine so they can provide basic health care such as administering immunizations and diagnosing infections.