Devastating Exodus of Doctors From Africa and Caribbean Is Found

By CELIA W. DUGGER
Published: October 27, 2005

A new study documents for the first time the devastating exodus of doctors from Africa and the Caribbean to four wealthy English-speaking nations, the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia, which now depend on international medical graduates for a quarter of their physicians.

The findings are being published today in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study is likely to fuel an already furious debate about the role the developed world is playing in weakening African public health systems that have already been hit with pandemics that have shortened life expectancies in some countries.

Dr. Agyeman Akosa, the director general of Ghana's health service, said in a phone interview from Geneva, where he is attending a World Health Organization forum on the global medical staffing crisis, that his country's public health system was virtually collapsing because it was losing not just many of its doctors, but its best ones. >>> cont

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