Mozambique: 68 pediatricians for 12 million children

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Mozambique: 68 pediatricians for 12 million children

4:59 CAT | 26 Oct 2016

World Bank /Eric Miller (File photo)

Mozambique has only 68 pediatricians to look after more than 12 million children under 15 years of age. This undermines efforts to reduce infant mortality from current levels of 64 deaths per thousand live births.

“There has been a reduction in overall infant mortality rates. We have come down from 178 per thousand births in 1998 to the current 64 deaths per thousand births, but we still need to do much more about the number of professionals to meet our target population. Pediatricians ratio per inhabitant is 0.6 for every 100,000 children under 15 years, many fewer than the number required and well below world reference levels,” Valeria Chicamba, the head of the national pediatric program, says.

In addition to national experts, the system employs 13 foreign pediatricians, bringing the total to 81. But distribution is uneven, with the highest concentration of pediatricians in Maputo, with 58 doctors, and Gaza province the worst served, with 1,367,849 inhabitants and no pediatricians at all.

“Unfortunately, pediatrics is still seen as a profession for women. And it’s hard in our patriarchal society for woman to leave their husbands’ sides, so the majority are concentrated here in the capital,” Chicamba says.

Investment in training is seen as one of the ways to address the situation. “We have a training acceleration plan, where we anticipate to train 120 specialists at the level of all provinces by 2025,” Chicamba says.

Chicamba was speaking in Maputo yesterday at the opening of the second National Pediatrics Congress, organised by the National Association of Pediatricians, where she said preventable diseases such as malaria and HIV-AIDS continue to be the main causes of infant mortality.

The Second National Pediatrics Congress runs at a time when more than 90 percent of children in Mozambique are never attended by a pediatrician under the motto “The health of our children and adolescents is our priority”.

Source: O País