WHO: Increasing outflow of health workers to richer countries

Poor countries are rapidly losing health workers who go to work in richer countries, where there is a shortage of labor since the covid pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced.

The trend of nurses and other staff leaving Africa or Southeast Asia for richer countries in the Middle East or Europe continued during the pandemic, but has now intensified, the United Nations agency announced.

"Health workers are the backbone of the health system, and now the 55 countries with the most fragile health systems do not have enough workers, and their people go to other countries," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Secretary General of the WHO, as reported by the Voice of America.

He was talking about the new list of most vulnerable countries, to which eight more have been added since the WHO last published the list in 2020. They are: Comoros, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Laos, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Jim Campbell, director of the WHO's Health Workers Division, told reporters that countries on the WHO's list need protection so they can continue to rebuild and recover from the pandemic, without further losses in the form of labor migration.

"Around 115 healthcare workers died of covid worldwide during the pandemic, and many left the profession due to overwork and depression," he added.

As he says, protests and strikes have been organized in more than 100 countries since the pandemic began - both in Great Britain and the United States of America.

"We have to protect the workforce if we want the population to have health care," Campbell added.

Asked which countries attract the most workers, he said that they are rich members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as the countries of the Persian Gulf, but he added that competition is also strong in African countries.

The WHO notes that it is not against the migration of workers, but only if it is done in the right way. In 2010, the WHO issued a handbook on the international recruitment of workers and calls on members to adhere to it.