The Brain Drain Myth: Retention of Specialist Surgical Graduates in East, Central and Southern Africa 1974–2013

Excerpt

The shortage of surgical workforce has long been known as an important contributor to the large burden of surgically treatable disease conditions in many low- and middle-income countries (LMIC) and especially sub-Saharan African countries (SSA). One solution to the problem has been to train SSA physicians in various surgical disciplines abroad with the hope that they will return to practice in the region. That only few actually return to fulfill the primary objective of their training is well-documented [1]. The authors of the current paper present verifiable data, from East, Central and Southern Africa (ECSA), to show that training SSA surgeons in their own environments leads to in-country retention rates of 66–100% [2]. The strength of this article lies in the the richness of data presented on 1038 surgeons trained over a period of 39 years by a harmonized program in ten countries. …