U.S., Europe drain Africa of its nurses
By
DonAfrica
Hospitals in the United States face a severe shortage of
registered nurses. Heavier workloads aimed at cutting costs
have driven people away from the profession and few new
replacements are attracted.
Instead of increasing salaries and improving working
conditions, however, U.S. hospital managers have looked to a
solution they've used in the past. They've made an effort to
lure new immigrant nurses from poorer countries where even
modest U.S. salaries are attractive.
In doing so, they have increased the already great
suffering of the Third World, and especially, in this case,
Africa.
At a time when the HIV/AIDS crisis is ravaging Africa,
when the continent most needs its nurses, recruiting centers
from the industrialized countries in Europe and North America
are taking them away.
It's well known that African hospitals are already
understaffed and in desperate need in this period. In
Burundi, for example, a reporter saw people sleeping
overnight on the floor in front of a clinic in order to be
the first seen by a nurse the next day. Then they must wait
again to be seen by a doctor.
Yet this desperate situation has not slowed down the
global flow of talent from poor to rich lands. Recruiting
offices promise a salary 20 times what can be made in
Africa.
They attract people even though the nurses who apply often
have to travel for more than six hours--and then pay a $150
fee for their application.
The marketplace in humans
When most people hear the term "market," the first thing
that pops up in their mind is some sort of material goods or
commodities. But now you can't leave out human beings as part
of that market.
Water, food, technicians, doctors, labor-saving
equipment--all are in short supply in Africa. The only thing
remaining is nurses. Now it's possible to steal these nursing
services from Africa. Here is how it is done:
If hospitals need nurses, they contact the nurse recruiter
in Africa. In order to avoid negative publicity about a
"brain drain" from Africa to the United States, the
recruiters follow a complicated route.
There are already nurses from Nigeria and South Africa in
Britain. There are nurses in the Netherlands from Ghana,
Nigeria and other West African countries. To send a nurse to
the United States, a recruiter will make a request to the
Netherlands or Britain to find experienced nurses for the
United States.
British and Dutch recruiting agencies, which operate
within Africa, will offer high pay to Africans to bring them
to Britain or the Netherlands.
Before, nurses from South Africa had been sent directly to
Britain. After the South African government complained to the
British government, the agencies simply changed the target
hospitals and sent these nurses directly to the Unites
States.
Ghana: 300 graduate,
600 migrate
The U.S. and Western European hospital industry wanted
Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa to play the same role that
some Asian countries like the Philippines did a few decades
ago: supply a great many nurses. The difference this time is
that there was not even an agreement between the African
governments and the big powers, as there was with the Asian
governments.
Almost 600 nurses were lured from Ghana in 2000-- nearly
triple the number of departures in 1999, and more than twice
the number of nursing graduates in Ghana in 2000.
It should be clear that the kind of fair exchange of
medical information and skills--as is practiced between
socialist Cuba and some of the African countries or
Jamaica--has nothing to do with the theft of skilled people
by the rich nations. Under these fair conditions both
countries gain from the aid they give each other.
Africa has survived the slave trade, one of the harshest
systems known to humanity, only to have to face colonial
rule. During that colonial period the rule from abroad
produced hardly any trained nurses and doctors. Almost all
were trained after the countries of Africa won political
independence.
Now the industrialized countries, the former colonial
rulers, have opened up a new trade in human beings that
drains the African continent of its skilled health-care
workers.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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