UMA’s new leaders to send doctors to work in Rwanda

The newly elected president of the Uganda Medical Association (UMA) has said sending specialists and junior doctors to work in Rwanda as one of the strategies they have adopted to address unemployment and get good pay for all the professionals.

Dr Herbert Luswata revealed this in an interview with the Monitor on Sunday when he was talking about key areas his leadership will focus on. Dr Luswata, who served with the previous team as the secretary general, was elected by doctors last Saturday as the UMA president, replacing Dr Edith Nakku Joloba. 
“We have urgent issues affecting healthcare, which we think we have not yet completed [addressing]. Number one is the issue of unemployment,” he said.

“We are going to work with the government and Parliament to ensure that we get money which will be put in the budget to deploy doctors to health centre IIIs and other hospitals, and specialists [should] also get promotions so that the new public service structure is operationalised,” he added.
Currently, according to information from the Health ministry, medical doctors are deployed up to the level of health center IV yet many people also access care from health center IIIs. But specialised doctors have majorly been deployed in regional and national referral hospitals yet their services are equally needed in district/general hospitals, according to UMA.
Dr Luswata said they are working on the registration of an export company that will see their doctors able to work abroad.

Final steps
“We are completing the registration of UMA Export Company. So we are working with Uganda Export Promotion Board, and we have been to map out some countries in Africa,” he said.
“And we want to start with Rwanda where they are implementing a four-by-four strategy –they want to recruit professors in the medical field, specialists and junior doctors to beef up their health workforce,” he explained.

He added that they have met with officials of Rwanda’s Ministry of Health and are going to work on a Memorandum of Understanding.
 “…so that we can have the doctors go and work in Rwanda in a more organised way and also negotiate the best salary,” Dr Luswata said.
The Health Ministry Human Resources for Health Strategic Plan 2020-2030 indicates that by 2020, there were 342 specialised doctors and dentists employed by the government out of 1,300 who had registered with professional councils and had active practicing licences.

This means the government had absorbed only around a quarter of them. For general doctors and dentists, the ministry indicated that 3,124 were registered and had active practicing licences, although only 883 were employed by the government.

The low absorption of doctors into public service comes amid issues in health facilities’ staffing levels, which, according to the ministry, stand at 74 percent while a new report by Equal Opportunities Commission shows that hospitals have only 4 percent of the average of 8,000 health specialists required to optimise care in health facilities this 2023/2024 financial year.

Asked whether this wouldn’t affect the health system in Uganda, the new UMA president said the country currently has more medical schools that are producing more than enough doctors.
“The unfortunate bit is that we have doctors who are unemployed and the government has not been able to absorb them. As the government looks for money to absorb them, those who can go and work outside, we should allow them to go,” he added.