Medex: a New Approach to the Global Health Manpower Problem’

How to make health services available and accessible is a problem that confronts highly industrialized countries as well as developing nations. Although such nations may differ greatly, they have many points in common with respect to the availability of appropriate health care services. There is a shortage of health manpower in most countries of the world. What is frequently overlooked, however, is that in some cases an unbalanced distribution of physicians makes this shortage statistically relative rather than real. Nevertheless, in developing countries the shortage is genuine, no matter how it is described. For example, Indonesia has approximately one doctor for every 27,560 peoplewhile in the United States of America there is approximately one doctor for every 650 individuals (1). Yet both of these countries have a serious shortage of available and accessible health care services for particular geographic areas and population groups. In general, these problems most often affect rural areas and poor sectors of the population. Many nonindustrialized nations have modelled their health care delivery systems after those found in developed countries. This is often unfortunate, for in many cases the pace-setting developed countries which in-