Commonwealth Day

Britain is refusing to sign a code of good practice agreed by 22 Commonwealth countries to stop the poaching of nurses across international borders, it emerged yesterday.

The Health Ministry is to give urgent attention to drawing up an agreement with Britain to curb it’s poaching of South Africa's health professionals. Health Director-General Ayanda Ntsaluba told parliament's health committee that the United Kingdom would be the first of four Commonwealth countries targeted for such agreements. It follows the signing of a broad protocol on ethical recruitment of health professionals among Commonwealth members at a meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva last month. Ntsaluba said Commonwealth members acknowledged there were positive elements in the movement of health professionals between countries, but agreed that this should be structured under broad government-to-government agreements. These agreements should be aimed at co-ordination and planning to ensure professionals moving from developing to developed countries would return with skills. An example is when a nurse is recruited and works for three years in an old age home in the UK, he said. If she returned to South Africa and took a post as a theatre nurse, she would be effectively deskilled, whereas if she had worked in intensive care in the UK, she would have had exposure to relevant skills. The movement of skilled staff is only one area to be covered by the proposed agreement. British support for South Africa's Medicines Control Council and the strengthening of hospital management are other key aspects. Last month it was disclosed that the UK was continuing to poach South African nurses in defiance of a 2001 British government ban on recruiting health workers from poor nations, a practice that has led to severe staff shortages in some hospitals. According to Britain's Nursing and Midwifery Council, 3 472 nurses from countries on the banned list were registered in the UK last year. Tshabalala-Msimang has said she has allocated R500 million this year for a system of allowances to keep scarce professionals and attract recruits in rural areas. The figure may be increased to R750m next year and R1 billion in 2005/6. (Source: Christelle Terreblanche, Political Bureau, Cape Times, 5 June 2003)

Government could consider paying doctors and nurses better salaries to reverse the brain drain in the health sector, Public Service and Administration Minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi said yesterday. Her statement follows her recent instruction to the KwaZulu-Natal health department to rescind salary increases awarded unilaterally early in early 2001 to more than 49000 health employees with effect from July 1999. While the provincial health officials will be meeting public services officials this week to discuss the practical implications of the directive, Fraser-Moleketi told delegates at the opening of a three-day Commonwealth workshop on the migration of health workers in Sandton yesterday that government was developing strategies for retaining health sector professionals. While developing countries could not hope to compete with developed countries in terms of salaries they offered, Fraser-Moleketi said there were other ways Africa could retain its professionals. These included offering them non-financial incentives such as enriching their work environments and making sure health posts, particularly those in the rural areas, accommodated the families of health workers. William Pick, professor and head of the SA Medical Research Council, said many health professionals left the developing world not for financial reasons but to gain experience. He said that this was found in a recent study of health professionals in six African countries commissioned by the WHO. The results were to be released in about three to four weeks. Pick said the study carried out in Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, Uganda, SA and Zimbabwe was the first comprehensive attempt to quantify the migration patterns of African professionals. (Source: Business Day, 21 January 2003)

Harvesting plants for medicines to treat anything from mad cow disease to malaria could help alleviate the poverty of African communities, a Commonwealth conference heard in Cape Town. There is a demand for African herbs and plants to be used in medicines and our aim is to exploit that for development purposes to try to eradicate poverty, said Richard Gold from the Commonwealth secretariat at the start of the three-day gathering.

Gold said, however, that African countries that produced medicinal plants faced a tough challenge in meeting the standards of the industry. First of all, they would have to meet international safety standards for their produce and, secondly, they would have to document how the plant extracts were used to treat sickness and injury. Although such treatment was common in Africa, very little had been written about it. The conference, attended by about 100 delegates from African countries and international research organisations, ends on Tuesday.

Women are numerically dominant in virtually all health care disciplines except the medical profession. This anomaly is rooted in developments in Western medicine during the 16th and 17th centuries when knowledge of anatomy, physiology and the causes of diseases regained a scientific and theoretical base after the hiatus of the medieval period. Medical training was then established in the universities and the role of wise women and female healers was increasingly discredited and relegated to the treatment of women and those who could not afford the care of learned male physicians.