It will Take Nigeria 100 Years to Produce Enough Doctors

Posted on: Thu 05-11-2015

It has emerged that it will take Nigeria a whopping 100 years to come up with enough doctors to address the poor doctor-patient ratio I the country, going with World health Organization (WHO) standard ratio of 1:600.

The Provost, College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Prof. Folasade Ogunsola, made this revelation wednesday while addressing journalist at the 3 day workshop on ‘New Bench Mark Minimum Academic Standard for Medical Program in Nigerian Universities’ held in Abuja.

According to her, “Nigeria needs about 237,000 doctors to address the poor doctor-patient ratio, but will take the country over a century to make the number; however, making facilities available for quality doctors will go a long way to keep them in the country.

"Today, we have about 35,000 practicing doctors, we looked at it at one point, assuming no doctor leaves this country after being trained, and with the numbers coming out of our medical school every year, it will take us about 100 years to have the ideal numbers we need.

“But it is not just about numbers, it is about quality. Presently, medical schools have quotas, the number of people that can be admitted, some people wonder why it has to be so, but the reason is that they have to be trained competently, and you can only train within the facility of the university,” she added.

Ogunsola, observed that medical schools has not been given attention, owning that inadequate funding results to lack of infrastructures and facilities, which in turn affects the number of candidates admitted into the college and the quality of medical students churned out from them.

“We have to rethink how we are training them. We have to rethink how to fund medical school especially In these days of dwindling economy, the government need to actually direct fund to the medical schools for infrastructure, for equipment, laboratories, training, because medical education is changing and medical sciences is changing rapidly, so even those in it now must be moving with the trend, new disease are coming on, we were lucky with Ebola, but one thing is that more are coming up, as we expand, we are having new problems at hand, we as a nation must be ready,” she stressed.

She added that Nigeria need about 237,000 doctors, “we have about 35000, we have trained more than that but many of them are outside the country, many of them are in the country but have moved into other professions like banking, music, among others. But we calculated that if all the medical doctors, with today's quota, and nobody leaves, it will take us about 101 years to make that number."

She urged Federal Government to provide special funding for colleges of medicine to enable them achieve the purpose for which they were established.

Responding, the Executive Secretary, National Universities Commission, Prof. Julius Okojie, said the commission will work with stakeholders to address the issues in the system, as various issues will be looked into in the workshop.

By: Kasim Sumaina

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