President of the Nigeria Medical Association [NMA] Dr Francis Faduyile recently raised alarm over shortage of healthcare practitioners in the country. He said only 42,000 doctors are available for Nigeria’s 200 million people. He listed insecurity, unemployment, low remuneration, bad roads, poor job satisfaction and poor healthcare system as some of the reasons why Nigerian doctors and other healthcare practitioners are leaving the country for greener pastures abroad.
Speaking at the 10th Annual Symposium of the Health Writers Association of Nigeria [HEWAN] in Lagos, Faduyile said about 75,000 Nigerian doctors were registered with the body but 33,000 of them have left the country. Only 42,000 doctors now man all health institutions in the country. He said in rural areas, we have one doctor to 22,000 people while in towns and cities, we have one doctor to 10,000-12,000 Nigerians, against the World Health Organisation’s [WHO] recommendation of one doctor to 600 persons.
Faduyile further said “Nigerian doctors and other healthcare workers including nurses and pharmacists are leaving the country in droves because of the poor healthcare system and lack of job satisfaction.” According to him, “The United Kingdom (UK) employs, on the average, 12 Nigerian doctors every week. If Nigeria decides to graduate 3,000 doctors every year without the doctors leaving this country, it will take us 25 years to meet the WHO estimate of one doctor to 600 patients.”
The NMA president also said Nigeria is losing some of its most educated, talented and professional healthcare practitioners to countries such as Namibia, Senegal, Ghana, South Africa and many others because government is not interested in giving adequate priority to health. Low funding, poor remuneration, lack of equipment to intervene and save lives, and insecurity are among some of the problems confronting the sector. He also decried how the situation is taking its toll on the country as “people are dying due to lack of effective healthcare system with Nigeria having one of the worst health indices in the world.”
The dearth of medical doctors serving in Nigeria is even likely to sound more alarming when the dead and those who have retired from service are taken out of the 42,000 which he said are left from a total registered number of 75,000. While Liberia, which is second to the United States of America spends 15.50 percent of its GDP on health, Sierra Leone which comes fifth spends 15.10 percent of her GDP on health. However, Nigeria ranks number 109, with only 6.10 per cent of its GDP spent on health.
Although Faduyile’s mention of other sectorial deficits such as bad roads tend to relegate the critical challenge of dearth of doctors in the country, his claims on the statistics of doctors void the assertion once made by Minister of Labour Dr Chris Ngige who said, “We have a surplus in the medical profession in our country. I can tell you this. It is my area, we have excess. We have enough, more than enough, quote me. There is nothing wrong when they go out to sharpen their skills, earn money and send them back home here. Yes, we have foreign exchange earnings from them, not from oil…. Brain drain will only be inimical when, for instance, neurosurgeons travel and we don’t have neurosurgeons here.”
Government therefore needs to act now to reverse the growing trend of medical tourism in order to also change the tenacious narrative where most General Hospitals in the country are no more than mere consulting clinics. Besides substantially increasing the funding of Nigeria’s healthcare delivery system, remunerations must also be improved upon by government.
To strategically address inadequate number of doctors, we advise an increase in admission space and facilities for medical students in Nigerian universities. While we encourage indigenous private investment in the healthcare industry, we also ask for increased incentives and tax holidays for private investors to guarantee conducive working conditions and environment that will dissuade doctors from taking up jobs abroad.
