Health workers’ cry
Health workers’ cryBy Editor
Tuesday April 10, 2007 [04:00]
Despite the many assurances and statements that have been made by the government in terms of improving health workers’ conditions of service, it is clear that things are not as they should be.
And we think that Resident Doctors Association UTH branch president Dr Musonda Makasa’s views on the matter deserve a lot of attention. Like Dr Makasa has stated, doctors and all other health workers for that matter, are still not happy with their working conditions. The government cannot deny that issues of low salaries, housing allowances and accommodation are still a big problem among the doctors and other health workers.
Apart from poor conditions of service, health workers still find themselves working in an environment which does not provide them an opportunity to do a good job. Again as Dr Makasa has rightly observed, most of our health institutions need facelifts because their standards are pathetically low. Even if doctors and other health workers had the zeal to do a good job, they are usually limited by a number of factors, including the lack of equipment.
It is these frustrations that are leaving our health workers with no option but to leave the country and seek work elsewhere. And whether it is doctors or nurses, they are leaving the country at an alarming rate.
In a country which has a poor health worker-to-patient ratio of between one to two health workers per 1,000 people, the continued departure of health workers should be a source of great concern. We are saying this because at the moment, and like almost all developing nations of the world, Zambia is faced with a critical shortage of health workers, particularly nurses. By health workers, we are talking about doctors, clinical officers, nurses as well as midwives.
But as World Health Organisation director general Margaret Chan observed last week in her speech ahead of the World Health Day on April 7, a chronic shortage of health workers in developing nations such as Zambia is undermining access to essential health services, including treatment for HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. According to Chan, thousands of health care professionals have left their homes in developing nations in search of higher paying jobs in wealthier countries. According to WHO’s World Health Report 2006, there is a shortage of more than four million health care workers in 57 developing countries.
We should actually be very concerned that one-quarter of physicians and one in 20 nurses trained in Africa currently work in 30 industrialised countries. And when one analyses the picture carefully, there is a perplexing paradox. For instance, whereas sub-Saharan Africa, which Zambia is part of, has 24 per cent of the global disease burden, it only has 3 per cent of the health care workforce worldwide and accounts for less than 1 per cent of global health care spending. On the other hand, the Americas, with only 10 per cent of the global disease burden, they have 37 per cent of the global health care workforce and account for more than half of global health care spending. And as if that is not adequate, we are further told that medical research and development is geared toward the needs of wealthier nations, while the health care needs of developing countries are overlooked. We see this in the fact that there has been very little effort to wipe out diseases like malaria from the African continent when this disease is no longer a problem for the developed world.
Coming back to the questions being raised by Dr Makasa, we think that we need to start addressing issues of the health sector with the seriousness they deserve. This is more so if we are interested in making sure that our health professionals stay in the country to serve their fellow nationals.
As we have stated in the past, we feel that what doctors and other health workers are getting today is not commensurate with the type of work they do. We are saying this because we know that doctors, and other professionals in general, in the region and beyond are well looked after for their strategic importance to the development of the nation. And the government should know better this strategic importance we are talking about.
And we don’t think that health workers are demanding what is not realistic. As we can see, the doctors are not only talking about their own conditions of service, but also the state of the institutions in which they work. Dr Makasa is talking about lack of equipment in UTH, not just about salaries or housing allowances.
We urge the government to start looking at the conditions of health workers very seriously because if the situation is not checked, Zambia will continue training its people for other countries at a very high cost but with no benefit to the nation. We think that our doctors’ patience has been stretched beyond limit. And we should not be surprised to wake up one day and find that all our doctors and nurses have packed their bags and left the country for greener pastures. But again, no one should blame the doctors or nurses if they decided to do that because we know how well our neighbouring countries look after them when they decide to go and work there. A teacher who is neglected and despised here is treasured in Botswana. And we see how our teachers are happier to work in foreign lands. It is the same with doctors and other health workers.
We therefore urge the government to start taking the cries of health workers seriously because their concerns are genuine and they are making them in the most honest manner. We know of the limitations here and there in terms of budgetary allocations. But when weighed against many other social needs, we think that health care deserves an equally large share of the nation’s budgetary expenditure.
Labels: EDITORIAL, HEALTHCARE
posted by MrK @ 3:52 AM
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