Challenges and opportunities for medics in free labour movement

Doctor attends to a patient: Our labour force is one of the most likely to gain from unrestricted movement in the EAC region. FILE 

By EDWARD OMETE

In Summary

• Kenya’s workers are the most likely to gain from unrestricted movement across East Africa.

Joachim Buwembo’s column in this week’s edition of The EastAfrican newspaper takes a satirical swipe on the region’s goings on.

The article looks at some of the bureaucratic bottlenecks of the harmonised labour laws and goes further to ask just how easy it is for this “free labour movement” to work? On our part the question is if it offers any benefits for health sector workers.

While talks are still ongoing on the federation, cracks have emerged within the member states which may delay the whole EAC pact from starting soon. On a positive note however, some ground work especially regarding curricula and training harmonisation has been undertaken

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For those in healthcare the federation offers both opportunities and challenges. Opportunities because enterprise thrives without restrictive laws especially on movement of labour.

It also offers challenges because most health cadres, especially highly skilled ones, are still in deficit even within member countries. In a free market where the highest bidder takes it all, will labour movement be allowed to thrive or will governments impose caveats?

Preliminary data on emerging trends in healthcare human resource and the implications for the county, private sector and the East African community indicates a few things.

Job market

For one, among the EAC states Kenya stands tall in the quantity of her health workforce. Granted certain cadres are still not up to internationally accepted ratios — but even such ratios are sometimes not cognizant of the vagaries of third world economies.

In the current economy the government would be unable to absorb 10,000 doctors into the system: for the simple reason that it doesn’t have enough money to do so, not lack of will.

While we haven’t reached the 10,000 doctors mark, trends indicate that in the next decade this pool of skilled labour could be in “apparent excess”.

Whereas in the last decade annual entries into the job market were in the low hundreds, the next five to ten-year projections show at least 1,000 and 2,000 entries respectively will join the job pool annually. The other EAC nations have poorer statistics on the matter.

This makes our labour force one of the most likely to gain from unrestricted movement. Already the number of such workers in nearby South Sudan points towards this.

Of course the assumption here is that working conditions in the other countries would be better than one’s home as a major driver for migration. However, given the relatively lower economic ranking for the other nations, that is also a challenge.

The probability is that those who opt to will move to a country that “rewards better”.

Currently, the only thing in our sector with relatively unrestricted movement at our border points is patients; as evidenced by Tanzanian patients in Kenya and Kenyan patients in Tanzanian hospitals.