The head of the UAE’s largest hospital has said that salaries must rise in an effort to ease recruitment problems.
Just days after a report revealed that the number of doctors and nurses will have to double within a decade, Dr Tej Maini, chief executive of Sheikh Khalifa Medical City (SKMC), told UAE daily The National that recruitment was a problem that “keeps me up at night”.
He told the paper that salaries would have to rise while more effort must be made to encourage Emiratis to pursue medical careers.
Dr Maini said there was a “shortage in every single profession in healthcare”, from pharmacists and speech therapists to emergency care specialists and cardiologists.
A report last week from the Health Authority-Abu Dhabi (HAAD) revealed the need to double the number of health staff in 10 years, and the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said the global shortage of health workers has become a “crisis”.
He said that while every Gulf nation was building new hospitals, they were not addressing the question of how they were going to staff them.
He told the paper that a global shortage meant that they needed “to be creative and look at things differently” regarding recruitment.
“We have to upgrade our medical schools, develop our postgraduate medical education, work on our residency training in order for it to be at least on par with what is available in the US,” he added.
