Foreign aid should boost Africa doctors' pay: WHO

By Laura MacInnis

GENEVA (Reuters) - International aid to Africa should be used to boost doctors' salaries and bolster the recruitment and training of medical staff, World Health Organization (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.

By 2015, when the U.N.'s Millennium Development Goals are meant to be reached, the report said that there should be enough doctors to meet overall global needs, but that countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Nigeria will still be far short.

Africa is likely to be short about 167,000 physicians in 2015, according to the economic and demographic projections by study authors Richard Scheffler, Jenny Liu, 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 organizations should consider increasing financial support of health-care workers as a means of improving recruitment and retention."

Some northern African states such as Algeria will experience "ample supply" of doctors in the coming years, according to the study that extrapolated economic growth and demographic trends.

"Future migration of physicians could take an increasingly regional dimension," they said, also recommending empowering nurses and other health workers to take on more responsibility.

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.