“While rich countries siphon off African doctors, they send their practitioners to Africa via the UN and NGOs”

2023-05-14 06:47:42

VIn Africa, the expression “medical deserts”, which designates the areas of French territory where consulting a general practitioner is a challenge, may seem out of place, or even come from another planet. Not only because the continent has 20 doctors per 100,000 inhabitants (10 in Senegal, 80 in South Africa), against 320 in France, but also because, extravagantly paradoxical, the countries of the South in fact subsidize the health systems of rich countries by expatriating a number of doctors trained there. Our “need” for foreign doctors is such that the bill on immigration – defended, withdrawn, then brandished again by the government – ​​provides, at least in its initial version, for the creation of a specific residence permit intended to attract foreign healthcare professionals to France.

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“We are helping to destabilize already poor health systems”denounces Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors Without Borders, who, in January, signed an appeal for the withdrawal of the residence permit project for foreign doctors. ” More, he adds, it is important to remember why this siphoning is so easy: in Africa, health professionals are underpaid and unstable. If African states devoted more resources to their health systems, the phenomenon would be of less importance. » In January, the International Council of Nurses recalled that a handful of rich countries – the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada in particular – are at the origin of 80% of the migration of nurses, and urged developed countries to become self-sufficient in training.

” Upside-down world “

This tendency of developed countries to shop in poor states has only increased over the past twenty years. The number of foreign-trained doctors practicing in the – rich – countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has, according to this organization, increased by 50% between 2006 and 2016. Again France, with 16 % of doctors born abroad, is it in a low range: more than one in two doctors is foreign in Australia, and one in three in the United Kingdom, bringing the average in the OECD. The “brain drain” effect on the countries of the South is radical: 8% of doctors trained in India and 17% of those trained in Egypt work abroad. This is the case for more than a third of Cameroonian, Congolese and Senegalese practitioners.

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As if this “upside down world” were not enough, the paradoxical movement of doctors and caregivers from the South to the North is coupled with another, in the opposite direction, much less subject to debate: that of the doctors and caregivers of the countries wealthy expatriates on a humanitarian basis in areas in difficulty. While the developed world, to remedy a shortage of political origin, sucks in African doctors, it sends its own practitioners to the countries of origin of the latter, through UN agencies and NGOs.

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