Qatar among best nations for child to fall sick in

Qatar has been ranked the 20th best country in the world for a child to fall sick in, according to a new index of health worker provision devised by the global health charity Save the Children.Chad and Somalia are the worst countries in the world for a child to fall sick while Switzerland and Finland rank as the best. Qatar was the highest ranking Gulf state in the index. Kuwait was ranked 47th out of 161 countries followed by Oman (54), Bahrain (59), UAE (60) and Saudi Arabia (73). Qatar’s healthcare sector scored 0.832 with 2.76 doctors and 7.37 nurses and midwives per 1,000 people. The other GCC states ranked significantly lower with scores of 0.317 for Kuwait, 0.300 in Oman, 0.258 in Bahrain, 0.301 in the UAE and 0.152 in Saudi Arabia. Children in the bottom 20 countries, which include Ethiopia and Nigeria, are five times more likely to die than those further up the index amid a shortage in global health workers, said the charity. “The global health worker crisis is costing children’s lives every day. All the vaccines, lifesaving drugs and preventive care mean nothing when there are no skilled health workers to deliver them to the children who need them most,” Mary Beth Powers, chief of Save the Children’s newborn and child survival campaign, said in a statement. The index was released ahead of the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this month, designed to outline a global action plans on chronic diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.Global charity UNICEF in May said that although a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa region have made progress towards improving the health of mothers and children, disparities within these countries persist. “The health and well-being of mothers and children is often determined not by what country they live in, but by their income and where they live within a country,” said Shahida Azfar, UNICEF regional director.“If these countries are to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, they need to ensure that access to health is equal to all,” she added. From / Arabian Business News