Dear Editor, I write from a clinic in a secondary city where we haven’t seen a resident surgeon in three months. While we celebrate our doctors’ successes abroad, we must confront the “medical deserts” they leave behind. Our brightest minds are fleeing not just for better pay, but for better equipment. We are training healers for Europe and America while our own mothers die in childbirth for lack of basic surgical intervention. We need a national dialogue on retention, or we will soon have world-class hospitals with no one to staff them.
