The migration of health workers from East Africa presents a critical challenge to the provision of healthcare and is a growing concern that urgently needs to be addressed.
Dr James Mwanzia, Chief of Party Funzo Kenya, IntraHealth (USAID), said East African countries need to address the issue of migration of health workers.
“In order to achieve Universal Health Coverage, we must ensure an adequate workforce in terms of their availability, accessibility, acceptability and quality. We must, therefore, seriously address the issue of migration of health workers,” Dr Mwanzia noted.
He revealed that the current retention rate of healthcare workers in East Africa is less than the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations and that remedial measures need to be adopted.
“Certain retention strategies can be put in place to address the loss of medical talent such as scaling up the training of nurses and clinical officers, continually investing in staff recognition and motivation, improving human resources management policies, practices, governance, using salary survey results and recommendations to review their structures, staff motivation, retention, and teamwork, and institutionalizing staff exit feedback and acting on issues,” says Dr Mwanzia, ahead of the Healthcare Management Conference at Medic East Africa, slated forSeptember 1-3.
