Over 10m healthcare workers are needed globally to meet health need- Enabulele

The immediate past President of the World Medical Association, WMA, Dr. Osahon Enabulele, has revealed that 10million more healthcare workers are needed globally to meet the health care needs.

He made this revelation while fielding questions from journalists at the Benin Airport on arrival from Kigali where he handed over the baton of leadership to his successor on completion of his one year tenure as president of WMA.

Dr. Enabulele described his experience in office as interesting, intriguing and an opportunity to make impact at the global level noting that his tenure has also revealed that Africa has a voice and can make impact in WMA which is a global arena.

“I want to appreciate all those who supported my tenure and to say that we have been able to say that we have made our own inroad into global affairs.

Importantly, what we have been preaching over time in terms of building resident healthcare systems has now been accepted as a reality. So, all nations of the world are now committing themselves more than ever before as a result of the very strong advocacy that we advance to ensure that they get committed to building resident healthcare systems.

That’s more important for us in Africa where we have very fragile health systems. Along with the issue of building resident health workforce. You cannot have a healthcare system that can not boast of the requisite number of healthcare workers.

Africa today has a deficit of about 5.3 million healthcare workers to off course be in a serious position to attain universal health care coverage. Globally, we need 10million more workers but of this 10million, 5.3 million more workers are needed in Africa. So in the light of the huge brain drain we have more responsibility to ensure that our government are taken into account to build more retentive mechanisms to ensure that our own health care workers, physicians and other health care professionals stay in their countries of Africa rather than even encouraging them to go because of indecent health working conditions that we have”.

Dr. Enabulele stated that he has been preaching and advancing the need to create conducive, enabling and decent environment in addition to competitive wages for physicians from Africa instead of always exporting them leaving the people in Africa to suffer for it.

” These has been one of the global realization and am happy that even World Health Organization, WHO, has accepted that in it’s latest launch of what they call Global Health and Care Workers Compass which is suppose to obligate government across the world more than ever before to get committed to the issue of ensuring that health care workers who are striving relentlessly to ensure that citizens and humanity is well catered for are also provided for”.

The immediate past President of WMA disclosed that the issue of violence against health care workers also received attention as legislative policy instruments has been pushed out to arrest the unfortunate development.