Ijaz Kakakhel Islamabad
A large number of lady doctors are out of job in Pakistan despite the fact that the world’s fifth most populous country badly needs qualified medical practitioners.
Ironically, this is happening in a country where the resource-constrained government is spending billions of rupees on subsidizing medical education in public sector universities. As many as 35% lady doctors are unemployed in Pakistan, revealed a research jointly conducted by Gallup Pakistan and PRIDE across the country.
Basing their research on Labour Force Survey 2020-21, Gallup Pakistan and PRIDE analyzed Pakistan Bureau of Statistics’ data on labour market specially female medical graduates and disseminated the same for the country’s wider policy circles. The crises-hit country while is facing a serious shortage of qualified doctors more than 36,000 lady doctors are either jobless or opt to remain out of the labor force for various reasons. “Pakistan has a dearth of trained medical doctors,” said Bilal Gilani, an executive director at Gallup Pakistan.
The survey shows that presently 104,974 lady medical graduates are residing in Pakistan. Of the total, 68,209 or 65% are working at various private and state-owned medical facilities.
The country, however, has 15,619 or 14.9% female doctors without any job while 21,146, constituting 20.1% of the total number, are completely out of labour force, the survey shows.
According to Pakistan Medical & Dental Council, since its inception in 1947 Pakistan has produced about 200,000 doctors, half of them being females.
The data from Bureau of Emigration show that around 30,000 doctors have left Pakistan since 1970 and on average almost 1,000 are going to settle abroad every year. “Among women, a major issue is qualified lady doctors are not working,” viewed Gilani. Majority of these doctors studied at public sector universities where the government spends billions of rupees to subsidize education. An average private university whereas charges the medical students with more than Rs 5 million the government one imparts the same education for less than Rs 1 million.
Thus the government has to give at least a Rs 4 million subsidy to produce a medical doctor.
This taxpayers money goes to waste as one in three of these female doctors are not working, the survey shows. Almost 50,000 female doctors on whom an investment of at least 200 billion in current value is wasted, it said. “We need to rethink about both the costs to taxpayers of these not working doctors but also the loss in terms of health outcomes which their absence is causing,” observed Gilani. Further, Dr. Shahid Naeem, director policy research at PRIDE, said one in every five medical graduates opt to remain out of labour force. Majority of these ‘out of labour force’ lady medical graduates are married, he said. “This is indicative of the presence of a social trend of getting medical education in order to secure a better spouse,” Dr. Naeem opined urging the government to review its policy of allocation of seats at least in the public sector medical colleges to ensure value for money.
