DHAKA (AFP) - Saudi Arabia is ready to take in more doctors and nurses from Bangladesh, which fears a shortfall of jobs at home after a major drive to train health experts, officials said.
"Bangladeshi doctors and nurses in Saudi Arabia have shown great expertise and we need more of them as we have established new hospitals there," Saudi Health Minister Hamad bin Abdullah al-Mane said on a visit to Dhaka.
He said Saudi Arabia would send another team to Bangladesh to look into importing medicine.
A Saudi delegation will finalise an agreement on allowing in more health workers from Bangladesh, the official BSS news agency said. Nearly 2,000 Bangladeshi doctors and paramedics are currently employed in the kingdom.
Bangladesh has only one doctor for 1,000 people but the number of graduates has increased rapidly in the past few years after the founding of private medical colleges, said Mahmudur Rahman of Bangladesh Medical Association.
"There is not that much lack of doctors that we had 10 years ago and even in the remotest village doctors can be found nowadays," Rahman told AFP.
Bangladesh does not have the infrastructure to employ all of the doctors it is now producing, said Haider Ali, deputy secretary of the health ministry.
"We need to employ all those doctors and this is an opportunity to employ them," he told AFP.
Foreign remittances are a major contributor to the Bangladeshi economy, with more than 250,000 workers heading overseas in 2003.