Health Action AIDS

In African countries like Malawi, Kenya, Lesotho, Uganda, Nigeria, and many others, hundreds of thousands of people are dying of AIDS and other diseases simply because there is no doctor or nurse to treat them.

Doctors and nurses in these countries don’t make enough money to support themselves and don’t have the medicines and equipment they need to help patients.  As a result, many of them immigrate to countries rich enough to pay them and provide decent working conditions, like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Right now, Lesotho has only 89 doctors for its two million citizens. Ethiopia has only 2,000 doctors for 75 million people. If the US had a similar doctor to patient ratio, we would have 8,000 doctors instead of the 800,000 we do have.

Two years ago at the G8 meeting at Gleneagles Scotland, G8 countries, including the United States, promised to provide universal access to treatment for people with AIDS by 2010. And the G8 countries have all endorsed the UN Millennium Development Goals, which include achieving significant reductions in child and maternal mortality and reversing the spread of AIDS, malaria, and other major diseases by 2015.

To meet these goals, to save these lives, Africa needs more health workers. By World Health Organization estimates, the continent needs at least one million more. It needs stronger health systems, and governments that can pay health workers at least enough to support themselves. It needs better human resource management, to make the most of the doctors and nurses who do stay at home.

We Call on the G8 to Keep Its Promise:

• Mobilize long-term, predictable funding and technical resources required to enable African countries to develop and fully implement national health plans that include comprehensive, carefully budgeted health workforce strategies that will train, retain, and sustain sufficient numbers of health workers.
• Ensure that the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions reform their policies to remove budget and wage ceilings that effectively limit spending on health and education, and that limit countries’ ability to invest in health workers and teachers.
• Train enough doctors and nurses to meet needs in their own wealthy countries, and implement ethical recruitment practices to avoid actively recruiting from developing countries that would be harmed by losing their health workers.
• Better align financial assistance with countries’ own health strategies, and ensure that disease-specific initiatives also invest in health systems.