The world is short by 4.3 million health workers with India being one of the six South East Asian countries facing the brunt of this acute shortage. According to WHO, there are 2.4 million physicians nurses and midwives to provide essential health interventions. This means over a billion people have no access to health care professionals.
A WHO report , “Scaling up Saving Lives” – launched at the World Health Assembly in Geneva on Wednesday-said 57 countries faced crisis of fewer healthcare professionals than required. 36 of which were from sub-Saharan Africa and five in Latin America and the Caribbean.
It is said that India’s general shortage of medical personnel had been intensified by poor distribution of health workers. More than 80% of India’s medical and paramedical staff work in the private sector in higher income urban areas.
Referring to the National Rural Health Mission the 110 page report said India planned to recruit more than seven lakh health workers at village and sub-district levels by 2013. It is said that worldwide, there were 59.8 million health workers. About two thirds of them provided health services, the rest were management and support workers.
“The world is facing a serious shortage of health workers. The crisis is impairing essential life-saving interventions such as childhood immunization, safe pregnancy and delivery services for mother and access of treatment for HIV and AIDS, malaria and TB,” the report said.
A Planning Commission document had recently said India was short of six lakh doctors, 10 lakh nurses and two lakh dental surgeons. For every 10,000 Indians, there was one doctor.
The biggest problem is that we don’t educate and train enough”, said Nigel Crisp, who co-chairs a Global Health Work force Alliance taskforce that prepared the report. The task-force was represented by Dr. K. Srinath Reddy from the Public Health Promotion of India.
This report also said significant international migration of health workers was another global problem. Crisp said: “Western countries are often accused of poaching doctors and nurses from the developing world with the lure for better wages. Bu this accounts for only 12% of the gap in health workers.” The Planning Commission however, estimates that Indian doctors in developed countries form nearly 5% of their work-force.
Source: Times of India