Karachi: Pakistan’s dangerously skewed healthcare system has more than twice as many doctors as nurses, a ratio that experts say is crippling patient care and wasting one of the country’s biggest untapped economic opportunities — its nursing workforce.
A new joint report by the Pakistan Business Council (PBC) and Aga Khan University’s School of Nursing and Midwifery (AKU-SONAM) warns that unless urgent reforms are made, Pakistan will continue to lose thousands of trained nurses to foreign markets while failing to meet its own desperate healthcare needs.
The landmark study, Pakistan’s Nursing Workforce – Export Potential and Challenges, reveals that Pakistan produces just 5,600 nursing graduates each year — a fraction of the requirement — while the nurse-to-population ratio is a shocking 5.2 per 10,000 people, far below the World Health Organization’s recommended 30 per 10,000.
At the same time, the number of nurses migrating overseas is exploding, with a 54% compound annual growth rate between 2019 and 2024.
“This is a crisis of our own making,” said Dr Salimah Walani, Dean of AKU-SONAM. “We must ask ourselves if our nurses are rightly valued and rewarded in our society and in our healthcare systems.”
She warned that low salaries, heavy workloads, poor career prospects, and exclusion from decision-making are driving nurses away, leaving hospitals to rely on less qualified staff.
Globally, the shortage of nurses is projected to reach 4.1 million by 2030, with demand soaring in the Gulf, Europe, and North America. The report notes that nurses are already Pakistan’s fastest-growing category of highly qualified workers migrating abroad, outpacing doctors, engineers, and accountants.
In Gulf countries, foreign nurses make up as much as 99% of the workforce, offering Pakistan a golden opportunity to position itself as a supplier of skilled professionals — if it can overcome the severe quality and retention issues at home.
PBC Senior Economist Farah Naz Ata said Pakistan needs to flip its perception of nursing from “undervalued to indispensable.” She added: “By implementing our recommendations, we can uplift healthcare standards at home, empower our nurses, and unlock a powerful stream of foreign remittances.”
The report is unsparing in its diagnosis: mushroom nursing colleges with weak clinical training, outdated curricula, lack of specializations, expensive and slow overseas licensing procedures, and a government that fails to actively market Pakistani nurses abroad.
Competition from the Philippines and India — whose nurses are more numerous, better trained, and more marketable — is another hurdle.
Among its sweeping recommendations are standardised salaries and benefits, leadership roles for nurses, targeted training for specific foreign markets, global accreditation of nursing programs, government-to-government hiring pacts to cut out exploitative middlemen, and aggressive media campaigns to restore respect for the profession.
Launched at AKU in front of health officials, nursing leaders, and policy-makers, the report is as much a wake-up call as it is a blueprint — warning that Pakistan is letting a critical health and economic asset slip through its fingers at a time when the world is desperate for exactly what it has: trained nurses ready to serve.
Ends
Health Alerts