Healthcare Migration from Developing Countries

That the Parliament notes with concern the increasing levels of migration of healthcare workers from countries in the developing world to Scotland and other developed countries which, according to the British Medical Association International Committee, is having devastating consequences for the developing world; agrees with the British Medical Association’s recommendations, made at a recent conference of commonwealth health ministers in Geneva and attended by the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, the Canadian Medical Association, the Canadian Nurses Association, the Commonwealth Medical Association, the Commonwealth Nurses Federation, Health Canada, the Medical Council of Canada, the Royal College of Nursing and the South African Medical Association, that the continuing failure to train enough doctors in the developed world is resulting in a major emergency in the developing world, that in Ghana there are only 1,500 doctors for a population of 20 million people, with two-thirds of their doctors leaving the country within three years of graduating and that the efforts to tackle global health problems are being undermined by the skills drain from the developing countries; further agrees with the British Medical Association’s four key action points that all countries should try and become self-sufficient in their healthcare workforce and should sign up to ethical recruitment policies, that developed countries must help developing countries retain their workforce by providing incentives for their governments to invest in healthcare, that all countries must ensure that their healthcare workers are educated and funded to meet the needs of their populations and that any action to combat the skills drain must take into account human rights and not prevent healthcare staff from working overseas if they choose to, and believes that Scotland should consider this issue in the long term and could help itself, as well as helping others, by building a hospital or hospitals in countries such as Malawi and rotating staff for training through them, thus ensuring that Scottish staff would gain experience.