President Bola Tinubu’s national strategy to address the issue of health workforce migration, aimed at retaining skilled Nigerian healthcare professionals who tend to migrate abroad, may not achieve its desired outcome if the government does not lift the embargo on hiring in the health sector.
Dr. Foluke Fasola, Chairman of the Medical and Dental Consultants’ Association of Nigeria (MDCAN) at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, expressed during a recent press briefing that the government’s restriction on recruiting health workers serves as a driver for those who would have considered working in Nigeria to also leave the country.
She highlighted that the shortage of staff is among the most critical challenges in the healthcare sector, significantly affecting the quality of patient care.
“A doctor that is probably to attend to 14 to 15 patients is now attending to 50 patients; it becomes very stressful and demanding for that doctor. Certain that the doctor will be burnt out. When at the ward, you expect to see a nurse to assist you.
“Maybe there are only one or two nurses on the ward with so many patients so that the nurse is not available to know what the doctor expects from the patient. All these impact the patient, and it’s important that we get this address.
“We know that a lot of medical personnel are leaving the country. This is contributed to by the poor remuneration in addition to the work environment in the sense that the facilities that you need to work with might not be available and you have to do a lot of improvising.
“One of the solutions is to improve the remuneration of the healthcare workers. However, I know that there are healthcare workers outside who need employment but are not being employed.”
“There are some government policies that are stifling the employment process because even before the usual japa Syndrome, we were understaffed.
“Even the embargo on employment had prompted the japa syndrome. If you’re a doctor or a nurse, you need employment, and they say there’s an embargo on employment. Certainly that will motivate you to relocate. So, some of the relocations was as a result of the government policy on the embargo on employment.
“And when people are employed again, another problem is that the payment doesn’t come immediately. Some people wait months before they are paid. I had colleagues who waited nine months without pay just because some policies in the Ministry of Health would not allow them to be incorporated into the IPPS to be paid.
“So the issue of JAPA syndrome is not just about remunerations; it is about the government policy about employment and people being unpaid. Even the little we are getting, they should be paid when employed immediately, not waiting for several months before they are paid.”
