Global diaspora of health workers yearning for home

THE MEDICAL supplies had been shipped. The planning began a year in advance. Then the coronavirus arrived, and Dr Charmaine Emelife’s heart sank.

The annual trip to Nigeria to provide free medical care – the flagship project of the Association of Nigerian Physicians in the Americas – had been set to start yesterday but can’t go on.

Now the 4 000-member organisation, like diaspora medical groups around the world, is scrambling for other ways to help back home, where help might be more needed than ever before.

A global “brain drain” of medical professionals to richer countries has left developing nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America and elsewhere without tens of thousands of highly skilled workers.

Some 30% of doctors in the US, and one-third of those in the UK, were foreign-born as of 2016, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

At the same time, sub-Saharan Africa has a painful shortage of medical professionals, with access to just 3% of the world’s health workers, according to the World Health Organization. Nigeria has four doctors per 10 000 people. Kenya has just two.

But even as some doctors, nurses and others overseas yearn to return to help with the coronavirus crisis, they face travel restrictions that have slammed shut borders and closed international airports.

The association is raising money to buy and ship protective equipment for front-line workers, reaching far beyond its US base for sources.

When the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-16 briefly spread to Nigeria, the association focused on sending “tons and tons” of protective gear, Emelife said. But the task is far more difficult now as the rest of the world competes for the same supplies.

So the association is also exploring telemedicine, Emelife said, in which members can offer long-distance consultations for patients in Nigeria, where some private medical practices have shut down out of caution, further limiting options for care.

Nigeria’s cases number nearly 500, but health experts say Africa is just weeks behind Europe and the US in the pandemic and the worst is yet to come.

“It’s the personnel that matter,” Dr Biodun Ogunbo, a private practitioner, said. “We don’t have the numbers of trained medical doctors, nurses, pharmacists” for the 24-hour care that some virus patients need.

The thousands of Nigerian medical workers in the diaspora, Ogunbo said, would “definitely, 100%” be welcome, along with insights into how virus cases are being treated overseas.

Emelife said even such items as soap and clean water were needed in parts of Nigeria. Africa’s most populous nation recently surpassed India with the world’s largest number of people living in extreme poverty.

This week, Dr Sefa Ahiaku updated the website of the Ghanaian Doctors and Dentists Association UK with the obituary of a Ghana-based colleague – “Coronavirus is no respecter of who people are,” she said – and a fund-raising appeal to buy protective gear for others in the West African nation.

“For us, the death really brought it close to home,” Ahiaku, the group’s vice-president, said. “We want to help out. That desire is more acute when there’s a crisis.”