NML Issue 9
NMLTT
2021
Protect.
Invest.
Together.
17
And we Need Herd Immunity
AFRICA AND THE NURSING CRISIS The COVID 19 pandemic that has put the entire globe on its knees amidst the already existing health care challenges has posed an overwhelming demand for nurses world over. Nurses have been so pivotal in the prevention and treatment of COVID 19 patients on the ICU beds and many have also succumbed to the disease in line of duty. With the current COVID 19 pandemic and its severity in many of the high-income countries, the numbers of nurses migrating from Africa to practice in the western world is expected to exponentially grow. With many of the African countries still struggling with shocking shortages of nurses, poor working conditions, low salaries for nurses, the current trends in the global demand for nurses is set to devastate such health care systems even further because of the likely increase in the international nurse migration and mobility. According to the State of the World’s Nursing 2020 Report that was recently published by the World Health Organization and the International Council of Nurses (ICN), there is significant reliance on foreign-born nurses in high-income countries, where 15.2% of nurses were reported to be foreign born or foreign trained. The global shortage of nurses is estimated to be 5.9 million with over 89% of this shortage concentrated in lowand middle-income countries where the growth in the number of nurses is barely keeping pace with the population growth. In many African countries, the nurse – patient ratio is several times a multiple of the WHO 17
