NYT: Devastating Exodus of Doctors From Africa and Caribbean Is Found

Devastating Exodus of Doctors From Africa and Caribbean Is Found
By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: October 27, 2005


A new study documents for the first time the devastating exodus of doctors from Africa and the Caribbean to four wealthy English-speaking nations, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, which now depend on international medical graduates for a quarter of their physicians.

The findings are being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study is likely to fuel an already furious debate about the role the developed world is playing in weakening African public health systems that have already been hit with pandemics that have shortened life expectancies in some countries.

Dr. Agyeman Akosa, the director general of Ghana's health service, said in a phone interview from Geneva, where he is attending a World Health Organization forum on the global medical staffing crisis, that his country's public health system was virtually collapsing because it was losing not just many of its doctors, but its best ones.

"I have at least nine hospitals that have no doctor at all, and 20 hospitals with only one doctor looking after a whole district of 80,000 to 120,000 people," Dr. Akosa said. Women in obstructed labor all too often suffer terrible complications or death for lack of an obstetrician, he said.

The study found that Ghana, with only 6 doctors for each 100,000 people, has lost 3 of every 10 doctors it has educated to the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, each of which has more than 220 doctors per 100,000 people....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/27/international/27brain.html

have national healthcare...how is that possible?? Our government tells us that WE have the best health care in the UNIVERSE, and doctors would HATE to have to work under a nationalized system :hmmmm

want to be licensed, they should have to spend two years either in a medically underserved area, either in the US or working in the developed world for the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Frontiers.

Same for all other highly-paid, licensed professionals who have critical skills that are in shortage in impoverished areas.

In other words, draft the rich.

doctors have to compete for jobs with them.

They are also easily molded to the will of their corporate hospital employers who then dominate medical staff policy decision making.

"Same for all other highly-paid licensed professionals who have critical skills that are in shortage in developing countries."

- You mean lawyers don't you? :evilgrin:

areas where there really is no alternative to Foreign Medical Grads, who have to take a set of extremely difficult examinations that many US MDs could not pass.

Don't worry about US doctors being out of work because of foreign workers in the US. If you're a medical professional, worry about the off-shoring of medical care as HMOs catch on to the fact that it's cheaper to fly patients to India or Thailand for surgery than to treat them here. The quality of care and facilities are in many cases better, and the cost is about 1/4 of identical procedures performed in the U.S.

In the end, the monopolistic practices of the AMA will end up costing American doctors more than if they had allowed foreign doctors access to this market.

The same economic forces that apply to computer professionals are now being extended to other professions. In most cases, immigration restrictions have a negative long-term impact on earnings of domestic workers, because of off-shoring. Barring the door after the horses have bolted is not the way to go.