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Ethiopia
unlikely to meet health sector MDGs
TELEMEDICINE SEEN
TO CURB PROBLEM |
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ADDIS
ABEBA(July 4,2008)
- U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals are meant to be reached 2015
whne there is supossed 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 countrie 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.
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