The chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) and Sokoto State Governor, Aminu Tambuwal, recently lamented the rate of emigration of qualified doctors to other countries which has resulted in a continuous medical brain drain in the country.
He also urged the federal government to ramp up the drive for the realisation of 25 percent needed to ensure universal health care coverage for all Nigerians under the Basic Health Care Provision Fund (BHCPF).
Nigeria currently suffers from brain drain, and the country’s health care sector seems to be the worst hit.
Nigeria’s doctors-to-patient ratio is 1:9,083, a wide contrast to the World Health Organisation’s recommendation of one doctor to 600 patients.
With Nigeria’s over 200 million population, the country requires at least 363,000 additional doctors to meet this target.
Africa’s most populous country is in dire need of health workers, but the challenges in the sector is leading to continuous migration trend of health workers to other countries in search of better work conditions.
From 1963 to date, Nigeria produced only 93,000 doctors; and the Nigeria Medical Association recently lamented that the country is left with just 24,000 doctors, which is inadequate to cater for the general population.
Unfortunately, a huge number of these doctors have left for greener pastures.
Reasons for migration
The reasons doctors are emigrating have been talked about severally, but the governments, both past and present administrations, still do not think health care is an important aspect of the economy to pay attention to.
Inappropriate remuneration for members, generally unsatisfactory conditions of service and inadequate infrastructure in hospitals are among the myriads of challenges chasing competent hands away from Nigerian hospitals.
A young Nigerian doctor, who prefers to be addressed simply as Dr Ejeh, spoke to Development Diaries about the pains her colleagues go through in Nigeria and why they are leaving.
‘The state of health care in Nigeria is below standard; the hospitals are not stacked up to the average that requires you to save the life of someone’, Dr Ejeh, who also has plans to migrate for greener pastures, said.
‘For example, you want to do a resuscitation procedure, not a lot of hospitals have the materials that you need to resuscitate a patient.
‘The average general hospital barely has a working EKG [EKG, also known as ECG, is an electrocardiogram that records the electrical signal from the heart to check for different heart conditions] machine, you have to send patients that have cardiac problems out of the hospital to go and do an EKG’.
The Covid-19 pandemic exposed several gaps in Nigeria’s health care system, with as many as 48.04 percent of people living in rural areas unable to access quality health care, according to data from the World Bank.
Poor funding for health sector
Nigeria has failed for the umpteenth time to meet the Abuja Declaration by African leaders in 2001 and the WHO to allocate, at least, 15 percent of yearly national budgets to health.
The federal government allocated N724 billion to the health sector, representing 4.2 percent of the N17.16 trillion budget for 2022.
‘Primary health care centres are not working so hospitals that are meant to be tertiary institutions are now functioning as primary health care centres’, Dr Ejeh added.
‘Doctors are overworked and underpaid; for example, in Abuja, there are hospitals that are paying doctors N75,000 and they will still owe the salaries or deduct from them, and you are expected to work 70 hours a week’.
She further lamented, ‘The work hours are not favourable for any normal human being. Our brains are shutting down.
‘There is also the problem of the abusive system; medicine in Nigeria is very abusive. The senior doctors rain abuses on the young doctors, for the slightest errors.
‘For Nigerian doctors to stay back, it’s going to take a whole lot and I am not sure the Nigerian government is ready for that conversation’.
Urgent response
Stakeholders in the health sector need to come up with a way of engaging the policymakers on how best to revamp the nation’s health care system.
The migration of health professionals in Nigeria deserves critical attention due to its adverse effects on the health care system.
As the nation’s population is increasing, so is the need for more health professionals; hence, the federal government needs to act fast to curb the mass exodus of medical practitioners.
Photo source: World Bank
