Sending health professionals abroad

With the recurrent offensives of Covid-19 variants, many countries are suffering from a lack of enough health professionals, including doctors and nurses. To make up for the shortage of doctors and nurses, a good number of countries in Europe and Asia even hired their final year students of medical courses as physicians and nurses to cater to the growing demand for healthcare services. While the Bangladesh government also recruited thousands of medics and nurses in recent months to tackle the virus situation, it is now planning to send health professionals to the Maldives. When it comes to remittance earnings, the potential of sending healthcare professionals to foreign countries makes sense, also for individual doctors and nurses.

The government on Sunday approved a draft agreement for sending health professionals to the Maldives. The approval came in a virtual cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, Cabinet Secretary Khandakar Anowarul Islam said in a press briefing. Under the proposed agreement, the Maldives would hire qualified health professionals, clinical specialists, public health specialists, dental surgeons, nurses, and other auxiliary staff. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina is set to visit the Maldives tomorrow to boost bilateral relations with the South Asian country. Currently, more than 1 lakh Bangladeshis, mostly workers, live in the island country of the north-central Indian Ocean. In fiscal year 2020-21, Bangladesh exported goods worth over $6 million to the Maldives. In November, both countries agreed to set up a direct shipping line with Chattogram. The launch of direct flights on the Dhaka-Male route opened up possibilities of agricultural goods exports to the island nation from Bangladesh.
On the other hand, many students from the Maldives are staying in Bangladesh for educational purposes.

The South Asian Muslim nation, the Maldives, has universal health insurance that covers a plethora of primary care services. The country has a tier-based healthcare system. Every inhabited island, even the most sparsely populated, has a primary care facility in the Maldives. According to a 2018 report from the World Health Organization (WHO), 9 per cent of the Maldives’ GDP goes toward healthcare. The country spends a higher percentage of its GDP on healthcare than any country in Southeast Asia, where the average expenditure for the region is 3.46 per cent. But the Maldives, an archipelago of about 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean, faces unique challenges. It can’t easily call up masses of students because it has only one medical college. And it can’t rely just on its citizens, because its healthcare system depends largely on foreign workers, many of them from India. In 2018, expatriates made up all but a fifth of the Maldives’s 900 or so doctors and more than half of its nearly 3,000 nurses, a report of the Maldives government said.

According to a recent report, there are only 66,958 registered nurses in Bangladesh and 46 per cent of them work in the government sector. The majority of them work in metropolitan areas. While there are 5.8 nurses for every 10,000 people in the country’s urban areas, there are only 0.8 nurses for the same number of people in rural areas, according to the latest WHO report. Bangladesh also falls behind in maintaining the minimum threshold of doctors and nurses for every 10,000 population set by WHO.

Presently, Bangladesh has more than 100 public and private nursing institutes and colleges, and around 150 dental colleges. Many foreign students from Asian countries including Iran, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and the Maldives now study in our medical and dental colleges, and nursing institutes. The education quality of such institutes have drawn foreign students. Sending health professionals to foreign countries like the Maldives is a welcome move from the government. Their recruitments also deserve to be a win-win situation as far as salaries and other perks are concerned. The Maldives is now in a crisis for doctors and nurses, given the magnitude of the coronavirus.

We hope the prime minister’s Maldives visit will focus on the competitive packages for our health professionals.