According to the International Council of Nurses (ICN), seven or eight wealthy countries - including Britain, the United States and Canada - are responsible for around 80% of international migration of nurses. , in an attempt to fill their national shortages.
These massive recruitments, in African or Asian countries whose health systems are among the most fragile on the planet, are difficult to justify, she underlined.
“We are very concerned about some examples,” said Howard Catton, director general of the ICN, during a press conference organized by the association of UN correspondents in Geneva on Monday.
He thus evoked the talks between Great Britain and Ghana with a view to an agreement via which London would pay Accra 1,000 pounds (1,140 euros) per nurse recruited.
“This is not in any way recognizing the true value of the costs of training this nurse,” or “the loss to the Ghanaian health system,” he explained.
Mr. Catton also denounced the agreement concluded by London with the Nepalese government for the recruitment of nurses, while there are 80 nurses for 10,000 inhabitants in Great Britain, compared to around 20 in Nepal.
“It removes nurses from an already very weak base, where access to care is limited” and thus may disappear in places, he said.
International recruitment is also mainly focused on specialized and experienced nurses, deplores the CII.
"This creates a serious lack of expertise in countries that cannot afford to lose their most experienced nurses", underlined the president of the ICN, Pamela Cipriano, expressing her "great concern" at this "genuine drain of brains" in progress.
She appealed to the "ethics" of recruiting countries, asking them to mobilize to become self-sufficient in the training of nurses.
"Health is a global issue" and "we don't want to see some countries prosper and others suffer," she said.
Founded in 1899, the Geneva-based ICN is a federation of more than 130 national nursing associations representing 28 million nurses worldwide.
© 2023 AFP