08 April 2005
National Health Service recruitment of medical staff from developing countries threatens the Third World's ability to tackle the HIV/Aids crisis, MPs have warned.
In a report on April 6, the Commons Public Accounts Committee says: 'Arrangements to prevent active recruitment of skilled health workers from developing countries, without the agreement of those countries, should be tightened.'
This recruitment is supposedly governed by a Department of Health code of conduct, but this is 'not well monitored' and does not apply to workers recruited via private firms. The MPs say the government should make the code effective and explore extending it to indirect recruitment.
Their report looks at the Department for International Development's HIV/Aids work, on which it spent £270m in 2003/04. The UK is due to spend £1.5bn over the next three years on measures to combat the disease.
At least 65 million people have been infected in the past 20 years, with the worst rates in sub-Saharan Africa, in what committee chair Edward Leigh called an 'epidemic horrifying in scale'.
More should be done to ensure that the money reaches those most in need, with a country-by-country programme to identify those at risk, the report says.
It also calls on the DfID to examine why the price of drugs varies so widely across the developing world, and to devote more of its budget to tackling the impact of the disease on the economies of affected countries.
'The department should give higher priority to mitigating the wider social and economic impacts of the epidemic,' the report says.
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