'Lack of urgency' in tackling Africa's healthworkers' shortage

The focus of World Health Day this year is the global shortage of health workers, but the African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) is particularly concerned about Africa, where the majority of the countries have not met the World Health Organisation recommended 20 doctors per 100,000 population.

Just over a year ago, the Commission for Africa report declared that donors and African governments should urgently invest in training and retention to ensure there are an additional one million health workers by 2015.

But according to Peter Ngatia, AMREFs expert on health training, the situation is not being addressed with the urgency it requires.

He says: The fact remains that Africa bears 25% of the disease burden but has only 0.6% of the worlds health workforce. Large parts of the continent have no effective health care at all. Visiting health centres in rural areas, in particular, is often a pathetic sight. Health workers there are struggling with enormous queues, complicated illnesses they dont feel confident to treat and out-of-date or non-existent equipment.

At a conference in Nigeria in 2001, African governments agreed that they should allocate at least 15% of their annual budgets to health care. But few have reached this target.

Peter Ngatia adds: African governments have to prioritise meeting this target and the international community should increase bi-lateral aid for health care to help them to do this. And World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions advocating cuts to health spending, which have led to chronic underinvestment in health systems over the years, have to come to an end.

Suffering from low wages, poor morale and lack of equipment, it is no surprise that more than 20,000 African doctors and nurses leave Africa every year, many of them to the UK.

AMREF welcomes the fact that the UK has put a code of conduct in place which means that it will not actively recruit from certain developing countries, but this needs to be tightened to include the private recruitment sector.

But ultimately, AMREF believes that African governments have to take responsibility for creating a conducive and conflict-free environment for African doctors and nurses to work in. This includes addressing the huge disparities between urban and rural health facilities.

AMREF is supporting the government to do this through various innovative projects. In Kenya, HIV/Aids, TB and malaria are the major causes of fatality but the majority of nurses are not qualified to treat them. AMREF is working with the Ministry of Health, the Nursing Council of Kenya and Accenture to upgrade 26,000 nurses from all over Kenya, through an e-learning programme, so that they are qualified to treat the diseases that are having such an enormous impact in the country.

Peter Ngatia said: Training 26,000 nurses would take 100 years under the current system, but by using Accentures innovative electronic learning system, we are targeting to train the same number in just five years.

With support from Vodafone UK, AMREF is providing computers, scanners and mobile and satellite phone technology to enable doctors in rural areas to consult live on difficult cases with AMREFs central laboratory in Nairobi.

AMREF is also empowering communities to take control of their own health development by training and supporting informal health workers to deliver health care and education, working alongside local health authorities.

All in all, a massive effort from African governments and communities and international donors alike is needed to address the growing burden of disease that Africa faces.

ENDS