Liberia health service hampered by staff shortages

from AFP via Google

MONROVIA (AFP) — Liberia's health services are chronically understaffed with only 51 native doctors in the war-ravaged west African nation, Health Minister Walter Gwanigale said Thursday.

"If we go by the (UN) millennium development goals, for a population about 2.3 million people, we should have a minimum of 960 doctors. Right now Liberia has 122 doctors, and 51 of those are Liberian doctors," Gwanigale told AFP.

Many of the doctors working in Liberia are employed by non-governmental organisations, the minister said.

The country is still emerging from 14 years of successive and brutal civil wars during which much of its infrastructure was destroyed, including clinics that have yet to be rebuilt.

Gwanigale said that unless Liberia tackled the problem, "we are not going to be able to deliver good care to our people. We need close to about 4,800 nurses. Right now we have about 600. We have 400 midwives, and we need 1,400. That's how serious it is."

"Out of every 100,000 women that give birth to a child, 1,000 of them die," the minister added.

"The reason is that they are not being delivered by trained people. The solution is to train more people. But first prevent those that are there from leaving by paying them better."

The World Health Organisation estimates that about 10 percent of the Liberian population currently has access to health care, with major disparities between urban areas and the countryside, where more than half the people live.