Africa Hard Hit by Health Worker Gap

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Every week, Charity Kiconco drives hundreds of miles down some of the world's worst roads on a motorbike, bringing drugs and counseling to hundreds of AIDS patients.

Health worker Charity Kiconco oversees the distribution of Anti-Retro Viral drugs to patients in the...

Health worker Charity Kiconco oversees the distribution of Anti-Retro Viral drugs to patients in the Kasangati health centre, 20 kms outside Kampala, Uganda, Wednesday March 5, 2008. The World Health Organisation estimates that there is a shortage of over four million health workers globally.(AP Photo/Katy Pownall)

(AP)

What the 26-year-old Kiconco lacks in medical training, she makes up for in commitment.

"It's a hard job. It's exhausting both physically and mentally," she said. "But then you see the difference you make to someone's life and it's worth it somehow."

Deploying workers like Kiconco trained in key tasks but without the range of qualifications of a nurse or doctor is one way of addressing a global health care shortage that is hitting African and other developing nations hardest.

Experts gathered in Uganda this week to discuss the problem also considered asking rich countries — which often benefit from the migration of health care workers — to compensate poorer nations for the staff they recruit and to pay to train health workers in the developing world.

The long-term goal, though, was galvanizing the funding and political will to radically expand the education and training of health workers in the developed and developing world.

The World Health Organization estimates that more than 4 million more health workers are needed worldwide to improve health systems and achieve international health and development goals. The gap is felt keenly in Africa, which carries 25 percent of the global disease burden yet has only 3 percent of the world's health workers and 1 percent of its economic resources.

"What's the use in having medicines if we don't have health workers to take it to the patients and ensure it's taken correctly?" asked Miriam Were, the head of the African Medical and Research Foundation.

Were previously worked as a teacher in Kenya but switched to medicine when she saw how many of her students missed classes due to preventable illnesses like diarrhea and malaria.

More typically, though, the movement is not from teaching to medicine, but out of Africa. For overworked and underpaid workers in developing countries, migration is often an appealing option.