12th June, 2007
AMREF welcomes the G8’s recognition of the huge impact that the shortfall in health workers has on the delivery of adequate and accessible health care in Africa. However, nothing concrete has been proposed to tackle the shortage of a million health workers facing Africa, falling far short of what the G8 leaders could have agreed.
The final communiqué states that G8 countries will work with African states to address issues such as working conditions and salaries for health workers. “This is extremely important, but is simply not enough,” says Sarah Hall, AMREF UK’s advocacy officer. “The G8 must support African countries, both financially and technically, to develop national plans which focus on matching the skills of health workers to local needs as an immediate priority.”
The health worker crisis is particularly acute in rural and hard-to-reach areas, where the majority of the African population lives. In Uganda, for example, 70% of medical doctors and 40% of nurses and midwives are based in urban areas serving only 12% of the population, meaning that many rural facilities are served by untrained or less-skilled workers.
For Africa to meet any of the health-related millennium development goals, there is an urgent need for approaches which can quickly improve the training and capacity of health workers on a large scale. This should involve increasing the numbers, responsibilities and skills of lower and middle level cadres of health workers such as clinical officers; empowering and supporting community health workers to deliver preventive and curative care at community level; and ensuring that all health workers are provided with appropriate training and support to help motivate and retain them where they are needed most.
AMREF believes the primary engine for this lies in African-based and led solutions which prioritise efforts to bring health care closer to communities. The G8 must support African governments to meet their Abuja declaration of committing 15% of their national budgets to health. Sarah Hall concludes: “Rapid investment in health workers is urgently needed to tackle this growing health worker crisis, which is causing so many needless deaths in Africa.”