Aids 'ravaging' African healthcare workers
Aids 'ravaging' African healthcare workers
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Friday, 04, Aug 2006 08:30
African healthcare is suffering because a number of nurses, doctors and other health workers on the continent are dying from Aids, it has been claimed.
A study published today by Dr Frank Feeley of the Boston University School of Public Health in the US analysing the factors responsible for depletion among the healthcare workforce in sub-Saharan Africa shows that deaths from Aids is most to blame.
While normal retirement was responsible for nine per cent of staff leaving the profession and resignation accounted for 23 per cent, death among nurses claimed 37 per cent while deaths among clinical officers caused 68 per cent of exits.
Dr Feeley concluded from the apparently premature average age of death, 38, that Aids was responsible for the death of most of those leaving the African healthcare industry.
As a result his study, conducted in two districts in Zambia, calls for renewed efforts from pharmaceutical companies and governments to further the distribution of antiretrovirals, which can help fight the disease, specifically to healthcare workers.
"Stopping the brain drain requires an unprecedented level of cooperation," said Dr Feeley, before pointing out that the death rate in Zambian nurses could be cut by 60 per cent if efforts succeed.
"Keeping HIV positive patients alive and at work in their home countries is a simpler task, and one that we know how to do," he concluded.