Analyze/Even if the hospital doesn't care about charity, you can't be a good healthcare professional if you're not a charitable person. One of the best characteristic features of a true vocation is the joy to give one's time despite everything to serve others, because every know-how is at the service of a population with needs whose solutions are found in a set of areas of expertise staffed by dedicated personnel who do not hesitate to work for long hours despite paltry salaries that some healthcare workers will never accept not because they love much money than the service they are call upon to provide, but rather because compared to the work to be done, including the sacrifices to be made on a daily basis, the salaries do not always correspond to the efforts required after a succession of stressful workdays, during which there is always important decisions to make.
If it were therefore only a matter of seeking a gain other than that of the satisfaction provided by healthcare workers to those who seek solutions to their ailments in healthcare facilities, and whose satisfactions are themselves sources of satisfaction for devoted staff, healthcare professional strikes would be more common in Cameroon because these legitimate, regulated, free, and responsible means that private and public sector employees can afford to use whenever they want, to claim their rights, are imperative necessities in so-called democratic countries, where employees occupy a prominent, respected, and respectable position.
Given the difficult conditions in which many healthcare professionals work in Cameroon, we must salute the resilience of these doctors, nurses, and other midwives who, despite the pathetic living and working conditions, continue to work to provide healthcare, especially in the most remote areas where the shortage of qualified personnel in particular reflects the reality of medical deserts, which are not exclusive to Cameroon. Indeed, unlike those who have the privilege of living near health centres that offer paid services, just like these reference health establishments, which are mostly found in large cities, populations in rural areas, for their part, face a completely different reality on a daily basis. There are some who do not even have the privilege of seeing a doctor, a nurse, and even less midwives. For those who even have the privilege of living in isolated localities which has a health centre equipped to meet immediate and basic needs, the lack of attraction of the local populations for so-called modern medicine is very often a discouraging factor that contributes to further accentuating the lack of attractiveness of a group of professionals who are not always satisfied with the idea of going to offer their services in the most remote corners of a Republic which belongs to a globalized world, where complementarity between tradition and modernity, is the essential condition for an appreciable and effective quality of care in corners where the enormous needs justify the sending of certain health professionals, who for some prefer not even to go there partly because of the lack of attractiveness of most of these village landscapes, or quite simply because they have a particular interest for the larger agglomerations. This is the reason why it is entirely possible to have infrastructure, and not have staff for personal and socio-cultural reasons because if in certain countries like in Europe for example where hospitals belong to the municipalities, health professionals who live in large cities are sometimes ready to go and work elsewhere, and in particular in rural areas, or in the countryside because the job offers there can be attractive, this is not the case in rural areas in Africa and in Cameroon in particular where the decentralization process is still in an embryonic phase which justifies the choice of locals to go and offer their services outside the country and even the continent, especially because the quality of remuneration at the national level is in some way, a manner to impoverish the members of one of the many essential links of a local development chain, which are not very often recognized at their true value, despite the fact that after the traumatic ordeal of the Covid-19 pandemic, the highest authority of the State of Cameroon decided by decree to extend the years of service of healthcare professionals, in a geographical context where, contrary to what is observed elsewhere, many are ready to work for several more years despite the difficult conditions, because they have difficulty making ends meet, and because they very often need more time to prepare for their retirement. This is the reason why, if in other countries some people revolt when a very high authority wants to delay their retirement despite the fact that their populations are aging more, others are rather happy, despite the fact that their populations are less aging, because the contexts and daily realities are largely opposed. What a European might consider as an unacceptable absurdity, this can be considered a beneficial decision for many healthcare professionals in Africa, and in Cameroon in particular, where many have chosen to offer their services elsewhere, particularly because local working conditions and quality of pay are downright discouraging.
Faced with the enormous need for qualified healthcare professionals in Africa and elsewhere, we experience every day the significant number of these healthcare professionals, distributed unequally throughout Cameroon, as elsewhere. Indeed, if as everywhere else, we are accustomed to saying that the absence or insufficiency of healthcare professionals in a given location is partly explained by a shortage of healthcare professionals, for geographers, it is rather the consequence of an unequal spatial distribution of professionals that is the basis of what is very often described as a shortage, but which is not one because there are professionals who do not want to go to certain assignment positions because of the lack of attractiveness coupled with the preference of many professionals for large urban areas at the basis of the statistical estimate of 1 doctor per 1000 inhabitants, in a set of geographical contexts where large urban areas have the best share of this unequal distribution of health professionals, at the scale of each of the areas which make up a set of Territories where, faced with ever-increasing demographic pressure, the human resources allocated to health establishments, particularly in remote areas, are insignificant for safety, structural, personal, financial and socio-cultural reasons which reflect the need to produce additional efforts in terms of attractiveness, which cannot be more significant without an acceleration of the decentralization process.
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