Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has expressed concern that the country’s doctor-patient ratio is deteriorating, with a current ratio of 1 doctor to 1,000 patients, far below the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended standard.
This worrying trend was highlighted by NMA President Bala Audu during a media interactive session in Abuja on Wednesday.
He elaborated, “The doctor-patient ratio is about 1,000 per cent less than what the World Health Organisation recommended. Recently, there was a medical school that graduated its medical students and I think they did a survey and asked the new graduates if they would stay or prefer to leave. Your guess is as good as mine. It’s something that is worsening, but it is something that we can mitigate.
“And I think that is the essence of such interactive forums, not to keep crying about our problems, but to profile solutions to these problems,” Audu highlighted.
The exodus of Nigerian healthcare workers to other countries has been a pressing concern, with many experts attributing the alarming brain drain to factors such as inadequate medical equipment, rising insecurity, subpar working conditions, and a flawed salary structure.
The statistics are stark: between 2019 and 2023, a staggering 1,056 medical consultants left Nigeria in search of better opportunities abroad, according to the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria.
Moreover, the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors reported that over 900 of its members relocated to Europe alone between January and September 2023.
To stem this tide, NMA President Bala Audu emphasized the need for improving the well-being of health workers, providing a conducive working environment, and offering housing schemes for doctors, which would help mitigate the crisis and make the situation more manageable.
“The issues that will prevent doctors, and nurses from leaving this country include improving their well-being. It’s more than just their take-home package, their take-home package is important because they also need to have health care, they also need to educate their children, and so on. And if another person is providing a better opportunity, there is a tendency for them to take that option.
“Also, we need to improve the friendliness of the workplace environment. There have been situations of attack on health care providers, especially by the people who take patients to hospitals, probably because one or other things are not available and everybody is charged up and angry, and you get attacked. The facilities also need to be improved.
“Housing is also one of the requirements, especially for internship training. By regulation, for you to have quality training for house officers, they must be housed within the hospital because they need to be available at all times. You hear very much about the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors. The residency training implies that they should live within the hospital, which means there has to be provision of accommodation for them.
“We train these people with a lot of money. This country invests so much in training every doctor, nurse, dentist, and other healthcare provider, but how many of them do we take up after they graduate, despite the challenges we have in terms of the demand power for health? So if we don’t employ them early enough, somebody else will come and employ them and take them outside this country.”
In an effort to address the brain drain in the health sector, the Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Muhammad Pate, announced in May that the annual admission quota for medical, nursing, and other health professional schools has been doubled from 28,000 to 64,000. This move aims to help curb the “Japa syndrome” – a term used to describe the mass exodus of healthcare workers from Nigeria.
However, the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) President emphasized that while increasing enrollment is a step in the right direction, it is equally important to upgrade the training facilities to ensure that these new students receive quality education and training.
“If you are previously admitting 200 medical students each year, now you want to admit 400 medical students each year, then you have to double the accommodation, you have to double the facilities for their training if you are to maintain the quality of their training.
“So these are the areas that we are having discussions with the government to ensure that those areas are improved so that we continue to produce high-quality health professionals, not just for Nigeria but for the rest of the world,” he explained.
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