SUVA, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- Fiji has 815 doctors to cater for more than 880,000 people, a Fijian government minister said on Thursday.
Fiji's Minister for Health and Medical Services Ifereimi Waqainabete said that this number was better than a decade ago.
According to Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC), Waqainabete said Fiji's population hasn't grown very much and so the patient doctor ratio was not bad.
"We've increased by four times the number of doctors within the last 20 years, with majority of these increases happening over the last five years. Within the last four to five years, we've gone from 400 doctors to 815 doctors. So you can see that the government has made very significant contributions towards increasing the critical mass of doctors and really decrease that shortage that we had before,"he said.
Waqainabete said the Fijian government was grateful for Fiji National University's Nursing Practitioner program that assisted when there was a shortage of doctors a few years ago in the island nation.
He also highlighted that apart from doctors, there are also more medical officials now compared to before.
Waqainabete said that while Fiji continued to absorb more doctors from tertiary institutions, they're working on enhancing the quality of doctors in the country.
