The World Health Organisation (WHO) recently alerted Nigeria to the increasing migration of health workers outside the country. The National Data Officer of the agency’s Code of Practice on International Recruitment of Health Personnel, Dr. Tony Udoh, charged the federal and state governments to stem the movement of trained health professionals out of Nigeria.
He gave the agency’s opinion on the issue at the second stakeholders meeting of “Project Brain Drain to Brain Gain”, organised by the African Centre for Global Health and Social Transformation, in Calabar.
The WHO officer urged the government to address the problem with an appropriate policy and mutual bilateral relationship with the affected countries.
He pointed out that the project was a culmination of concerns from Africa and some developing countries about the loss of their trained health workers to developed countries, and the need to stop it.
We commend the WHO for this timely admonition to Nigeria. Its concern and efforts to get the government to address the problem are welcome. The migration of health professionals from Nigeria is well known to our health authorities. It is a problem that has been with the country for many years now without any specific policy to address it. We hope that the intervention of the WHO will ginger the federal and state governments into action to stem the trend. It is necessary to check the unbridled migration of our doctors, nurses and other health workers to Europe and America, in search of better conditions of service.
Nigeria has been identified as one of the major health-staff exporting countries in Africa. Due to the deplorable working conditions and the dilapidated medical infrastructure in the country, many of our health workers move to the developed countries to fulfill their dreams of comfortable living and job satisfaction.
Available statistics show that only one in three registered Nigerian doctors is practising in the country, with the remaining two-thirds working abroad. In the United Kingdom alone, there are about 4,169 Nigerian doctors. An even higher number of Nigerian doctors are believed to be working in the United States and Canada. Meanwhile, Nigeria is said to require over 237,000 medical doctors to meet the WHO recommendation for our population, but we have only 35,000.
The WHO doctor/patient recommendation is one doctor to 600 persons. This suggests that it will take Nigeria many years to meet the WHO doctor-patient ratio, even if all the doctors trained in Nigeria work at home.
We, therefore, call on the federal and state governments to rise to the challenge of our medical workers’ exodus to other lands. The reasons for such migration are not far-fetched. They go to countries with good working conditions and adequate infrastructure to ply their trade. These are largely lacking in our country.
For Nigeria to curb this migration, the working conditions of doctors, nurses and other health professionals should be improved. Our health facilities must be well equipped with modern diagnostic and treatment equipment as well as drugs. Doctors should not have to go on strike before issues relating to their welfare and working environment are addressed.
We say this because the perennial strikes by doctors over remuneration are deleterious to the delivery of quality health services in the country. They are also a disincentive to the health workers. It will be impossible for these workers to put in their best when they are owed several months of salary arrears. At times, they are sacked en masse and asked to reapply by some state governors.
The Federal and State governments should stop paying lip service to the nation’s health care system. The time has come for the government to take urgent and pragmatic steps to ensure adequate funding of the health sector.
We also need to work harder at producing more health professionals, especially doctors. The facilities for medical training in the country are not enough. They need to be expanded and properly funded. All the inadequacies of our health sector are contributing to the increasing medical tourism by Nigerians.
Government should check the brain drain in the health sector by enhancing medical doctors’ salaries and allowances. Doctors should not be treated like other civil servants because they offer life-saving services. Their remuneration should be attractive and competitive. This is, perhaps, the only way to make the sector attractive to our doctors who are presently working abroad.
Let the federal and state governments work in concert to make medical practice in the country worthwhile for our health professionals.
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