WHO Alarmed By Exodus Of Healthcare Workers To Rich Nations

Poorer countries are increasingly losing healthcare workers to wealthier ones as the latter seek to shore up their own staff losses from the COVID-19 pandemic, sometimes through active recruitment, the World Health Organization said, Emma Farge reported for Reuters.

Photo Insert: Some 115,000 healthcare workers died from COVID around the world during the pandemic but many more left their professions due to burnout and depression.

The trend for nurses and other staff to leave parts of Africa or Southeast Asia for better opportunities in wealthier countries in the Middle East or Europe was already underway before the pandemic but has accelerated since, the UN health agency said, as global competition heats up.

"Health workers are the backbone of every health system, and yet 55 countries with some of the world's most fragile health systems do not have enough and many are losing their health workers to international migration," said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general.

He was referring to a new WHO list of vulnerable countries which has added eight extra states since it was last published in 2020. They are: Comoros, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Laos, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu.

Jim Campbell, director of the WHO's health workforce department, told journalists that safeguards for countries on the WHO list were important so they "can continue to rebuild and recover from the pandemic without an additional loss of workers to migration."

Some 115,000 healthcare workers died from COVID around the world during the pandemic but many more left their professions due to burnout and depression, he said. As a sign of the strain, protests and strikes have been organized in more than 100 countries since the pandemic began, he added, including in Britain and the United States.

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