Uganda: NGOs against exporting nurses

Ugandan government has been implored to increase health worker remunerations instead of exporting the human labour. of recent, there have been attempts to export health workers to Trinidad and Tobago.

By Winnie Mandela
Monday, February 9, 2015

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KAMPALA, Uganda - A coalition of Non-governmental organisations have criticized a controversial plan by the government to export almost 300 professional health workers to the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago.

The plan, which is being challenged , is believed will cause health worker shortage and further depletion of midwives, doctors, psychiatrists and other highly sought after cadres of health workers.

According to Joshua Wamboga Executive Director Ugandan Alliance Patients Organisation (UAPO) said if this plan is implemented, it will mean more suffering and preventable death in the communities particularly among pregnant women, newborns, people living HIV, Tuberculosis, malaria and other leading causes of preventable death in Uganda.

Wamboga said: “Government should be increasing health worker renumeration, improve working conditions and increase the wage bill so that clinics are saturated with motivated health workers.”

According to the human activists preliminary analysis of the government plan indicates that any remittance generated by health workers exported would fail to compensate or the economic costs associated with catastrophic illness and increased death rates.

Denis Odwe the executive director AGHA Uganda said Uganda is currently suffering from shortage of health workers caused by factors such as poor pay and working conditions, artificial ceilings on recruitment of health workers due insufficient government investment in the health sector.

“The shortage of health workers is killing Ugandans particular the vulnerable. And the government therefore should not make it worse by exporting the experts we have.” He said

According to ministerial policy statement for the health sector 2013/2014, poor wages and insufficient numbers of health workers have caused a persistent service delivery gap.

He said “in 2014 new data emerged that in health center IVs with decreased number of doctors and midwives, there has been increased trend in caesarian sections and blood transfusions.”

A recent analysis by the ministry of finance identified inadequate numbers of health workers as the main cause of persistently high preventable maternal death.

Odwe said “Uganda should stop defying substantially increase investment in the health workforce so that citizens seeking health care do not face a death trap. Uganda has an acute shortage of health workers that can only be fixed through investing in better pay and better working conditions and management.”

The government has been urged to come up with strategies of retention of the heaklth workers rather than exporting them in the era when Uganda faces a disease burden of 25%.

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