Posted on: Wed 29-01-2025

The recent alarm by chief medical directors (CMDs) of university teaching hospitals and federal medical centres (FMCs) about the exodus of doctors, nurses and other skilled health workers from tertiary health institutions in Nigeria gives cause for concern. According to the CMDs, the doctors’ action is as a result of poor remuneration. They warned that if the trend was not halted, our hospitals would be empty in two years.

Speaking recently at the 2025 budget defence session before the House of Representatives Committee on Health Institutions, the CMD of the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), Professor Wasiu Adeyemo, added that people resign, not even retire, almost every day. “In the next one or two years, we are going to have all our hospitals empty.

We need to do something about the remuneration of all the health care workers. Otherwise, government is putting a lot of money into infrastructure, and we are going to have empty hospitals. The major reason why people leave is for economic reasons. Consultants are earning less than $1,000,” Adeyemo said. The CMD of the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Professor Jesse Abiodun, lamented the delay in the release of budgeted funds to his hospital. This, he noted, adversely affected the operations of the hospital.

Even before the lamentation of the CMDs, the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Professor Mohammed Ali Pate, had noted that only about 55,000 licensed doctors, out of about 90,000 registered Nigerian doctors, attended to Nigerians as a result of the mass exodus of health professionals to hospitals abroad. According to the minister, in the last five years, Nigeria lost between 15,000 and 16,000 doctors to foreign hospitals.

The Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN) similarly lamented that only 6,000 consultants were remaining in Nigeria, as of February 2024. In a recent National Executive Council (NEC) meeting of the association in Ilorin, Kwara State, its president, Prof. Muhammad Mohammad, said data showed that about 1,300 left Nigeria in the last five years. The number of consultants, he regretted, would continue to dwindle as the retirement age for medical consultants is 60 years. In the next five years, according to Mohammad, about 1,700 consultants who are above 55 years will retire. The country reportedly produces about one or two consultants per annum. This number is too insignificant compared to the number of consultants that leave the country.

In 2022, the then Oyo State Chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), Dr. Ayotunde Fasunla, similarly raised the alarm on the exodus of medical personnel from Nigeria, saying the country might be made to import medical doctors to treat local patients in future.

SOURCE: DAILY SUN NEWSPAPER

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