Brains from poor

Press, 23 July 1980, Page 24

Brains from poor

By

THOMAS LAND in Vienna

Poor countries want industrialised nations to compensate'them for the loss of talented people who choose to work, in the West. “The) skilled fellow who comes y from our country belongs to us,” argued. Surendra Patel of India, director of the ' U.N. Conference on Trade, and Development (U.N.C.T.A.D), at a meeting about the world’s imbalance of professional personnel. ■ “From his childhood, we clothed him, we fed him, we invested; in him. If some country takes him away, we should get . an equivalent financial compensation.”

He estimates that the “brain drain” has cost poor countries $6 billion in the last decade, assuming an annual exodus of 50,000 skilled workers. U.N.C.T.A.D. is considering the idea of a special fund through which the recipients of “exported talent” will be able to make amends. The case for compensation has been strengthened by a World Health Organisation study showing that 85 per cent of migrant doctors practise in just five countries — Australia, Canada, Britain, the United States and West Germany. In Britain, a quarter of practising physicians are foreign graduates, mainly from the Commonwealth. In. Canada, the figure is one in three. African doctors tend to favour Europe and Canada, while Latin Americans head for North. America arid Asia. A new development is the emergence of oil-rich North Africa and the Middle East as a magnet for imported medical and other skills. There is another side to the coin: many doctors from

rich nations choose to work in the Third World from a sense of vocation. Thus Australia, Britain, Canada and West Germany are net exporters of medical talent. , Only the United States and Saudi Arabia take in more doctors than they send abroad, according to the W.H.O. study. In fact, the study gives ammunition to both sides. It argues that many migrant physicians “would, most probably, not have found suitable employment (at home) and might even have become a charge on the economy.” One important factor in the migration of physicians is that medical studies in the developing countries are still based largely on the standards and expectations of the West. Another is, as W.H.O. puts it, “the fact that the money spent on the education of these emigrant physicians would have been bet* ter spent on other and more appropriate forms of health personnel and health, care.” Copyright — London Observer Service.