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Training for Export?  (25 novembre 2003)

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Struggling to cope with a growing brain drain of professionals to industrialized countries, Caribbean leaders are suggesting ideas like "managed migration" and training professionals for "export" as ways to curtail the problem. 

Last month Jamaican Prime Minister Percival Patterson proposed that his country and the United States establish an agreement that would see teachers and nurses trained for "export". It is an idea Jamaica has been pushing within the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) for some time. 

CARICOM officials agreed at a meeting last year to examine the possibility of "managed migration", but to date the grouping has not taken an official position on the issue. 

Managed migration would see professionals trained to work abroad on a rotating basis, with a certain percentage of them migrating and returning to their home countries every few years. 

But the president of the Caribbean Nurses Organisation, Delores Gumbs, personally dislikes the idea of preparing nurses for "export". 

"I don't think that anyone should begin a slave trade for nurses. If a government is going to do training for export, we're going backwards." 

"We can't stop them from moving, but I feel if anyone is going to move, it should be the decision of the persons themselves and not a marketing thing," adds Gumbs. 

But President of the Jamaica Teachers Association Wentworth Gabbidon supports the proposal. 

"I think it's a good idea if we can come up with criteria that would ensure that the source countries do not suffer adverse effects," he says. 

"The reality of the situation right now is that teachers, nurses, other professionals are being trained and they are leaving us, and so if we can (agree on) some arrangement with other countries to assist in the training, that would be to our benefit," Gabbidon adds. 

The debate is a sign of the region's urgent need to deal with the continuous outflow of qualified professionals. 

Jamaica's Ministry of Education estimates the country lost 2,000 teachers between 2000 and 2002. Information from a meeting of Commonwealth Caribbean education ministers last year indicated that Jamaica experienced a 9.8 percent turnover rate of teaching staff in 2001. 

Barbados reported a teacher turnover rate of 2.8 percent in 1999 and 1.8 percent in 2000, while Trinidad and Tobago had a turnover rate of 4.5 percent at the secondary level and 2.4 percent at the primary level from 1998-2000. 

It is unclear how much of the turnover was due to retirement and intra-country movement compared to migration, although experts say they believe the majority of the resignations are migration-driven. 

"There are some people who just have a desire to travel, some to seek professional experience, but overall the most pressing one has really been people seeking to improve their economic conditions," Gabbidon told IPS. 

He says no hard data exists on the impact of migration on the education system, but notes that some effects are inevitable, especially in the specialized areas. 

"What we do know is that we lost quite a few of our specialist teachers in the areas of mathematics, sciences, languages and in more recent times, guidance counsellors," Gabbidon says. 

The problem regarding nurses is also serious, says Gumbs, while admitting to a lack of accurate, current data. 

According to 1996 figures, for example, in Barbados 16.1 percent of the nursing staff resigned, while in St. Kitts the figure was 19 percent; 3.8 percent in Guyana, and 5.6 percent in Dominica. 

Gumbs says the turnover would have increased significantly since then. 

"Now that there is a shortage in the United States and the United Kingdom, and agencies are actually coming in and recruiting, the numbers have drastically increased," she told IPS. 

Informal surveys in several Caribbean countries repeatedly turned up the same reasons for migration, Gumbs says -- limited incentives for professional mobility and promotion, nurses' dissatisfaction with leadership, a lack of involvement in the administration of the profession and, of course, low salaries. 

"I'm in the Virgin Islands. An agency could walk into the Virgin Islands, recruit nurses, offer them a bonus of up to six thousand dollars just to sign on for six months -- we've seen it," she says. 

"That bonus has nothing to do with their salary. Their salary as a registered nurse could be up to sixty dollars per hour based on their credentials. In the rest of the Caribbean, salaries are small." 

Out-migration has a negative impact on patient care, says Valda Lawrence-Campbell, president of the Nurses Association of Jamaica. 

"It means one nurse will have a ward of maybe 30, 40 and up to 60 patients," Lawrence-Campbell said in an interview, noting that an ideal radio would be one nurse to 10-20 patients. 

Possible solutions to brain drain, an issue in many parts of the developing world, are also being explored in international fora. 

Following the recent meeting of Commonwealth ministers of education in Edinburgh, Jamaican Minister of Education Maxine Henry-Wilson told the 'Daily Gleaner' newspaper Jamaica had supported a resolution that teacher recruiting should take place in a more structured way, so that source countries would be aware of recruiting exercises and have enough time to prepare for the expected loss of teachers. 

Caribbean nations also suggested that foreign governments establish offshore facilities to train more teachers, says Henry-Wilson, a suggestion which is expected to be examined at next year's Commonwealth meeting. 

The Commonwealth already has a code of practice for international recruiting of health workers, whose guiding principles are fairness, transparency, mutuality of benefits and the suggestion that recruiting countries look at ways to compensate source nations for the loss of professionals. 

The Commonwealth Consortium for Education, a grouping of educators who met in a parallel meeting to that of education ministers, has called for recruiting countries to bear "some responsibility for ensuring that the education system of the source country is sustained with a commensurate level of support to help ensure its capacity to deliver quality education for all its people". 

Gabbidon says the consortium wants to see teacher recruitment respect the principles of transparency, fairness, transparency and mutuality of benefits, as in the code for recruitment of health workers. 

Even given the limited financial resources in the region, there are a variety of approaches that Caribbean countries can take, says Gumbs. 

"We need to look at incentives, we need to look at salary

 differentials, offering those who have got a higher degree of education some kind of incentive," she says. 

Gumbs suggests that improving educational opportunities, and giving nurses a real say in the administration of the profession could also make a difference.

www.caribupdate.com    Novembre 19, 2003

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