Poor countries are losing more and more health workers to richer ones as the latter seek to compensate for their personnel losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes through active recruitment, the World Health Organization said this Tuesday.
The trend of nurses and other staff leaving parts of Africa or Southeast Asia in search of better opportunities in wealthier countries in the Middle East or Europe existed before the pandemic, but has accelerated since then, according to the United Nations health agency, in the midst of global competition.
“Healthcare workers are the backbone of every healthcare system, but 55 countries with some of the most fragile healthcare systems in the world do not have enough of them and many are losing their healthcare workers to international migration,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, general manager of CHI.
He was referring to a new WHO list of vulnerable countries that has added eight states since it was last published in 2020. These are: Comoros, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Laos, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.
Jim Campbell, WHO director of health personnel, told reporters that safeguards for the countries on the WHO list are important so they “can continue to rebuild and recover from the pandemic without further worker losses to migration.” “.
Some 115,000 healthcare workers have died of Covid worldwide during the pandemic, but many more have left their professions due to burnout and depression, he said. As a sign of tension, protests and strikes have been staged in more than 100 countries since the start of the pandemic, he added, including in the UK and the US.
“We need to protect the workforce if we are to ensure people have access to care,” Campbell said.
WHO says it’s not against migrant workers if it’s handled properly. In 2010, the agency released a voluntary global code of conduct on international recruitment of health care workers and asked its members to follow it.
Source: Terra
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