At least 9,000 medical doctors left the country in search of greener pastures in the United Kingdom, United States of America and Canada in two years, the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, has said.
The emigration of the medical experts which the NMA said happened between 2016 and 2018, negatively impacted the nation’s health care system that only 4.7% of specialists were left to take care of Nigerians’ health issues.
NMA President, Professor Innocent Ujah, speaking in Abuja, lamented the high emigration rate of doctors of Nigerian extraction to foreign nations.
Ujah who spoke at the NMA’s maiden annual lecture with a theme: “Brain Drain and Medical Tourism: The Twin Evil in Nigeria’s Health System”, also said over $1 billion was being spent yearly by Nigerians on medical tourism.
Regretting that the development was negatively impacting the nation’s health system, Prof. Ujah, who is also the Vice-Chancellor of Federal University of Medical Science, Otukpo, said Africa, including Nigeria, was encountering a health workforce crisis.
Noting that human resources for health, which according to him, represented “one of the six pillars of a strong and efficient health system”, was critical to the improvement the health system, the professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, said a huge amount Nigerians were injecting into medical tourism was weakening Nigeria’s economy.
The impact of the development on the economy, he said was a reduction of funding and investment in the health sector, widening infrastructural deficits and the growing distrust in the Nigerian health system by the Nigerian public.
“According to the World Health Organization (WHO), sub-Saharan Africa has about 3 per cent of the world’s health workers while it accounts for 24 per cent of the global burden of disease. Nigeria has a doctor-to-population ratio of about 1: 4000-5000 which falls far short of the WHO recommended doctor-to-population ratio of 1:600. Nigeria is still grappling with disturbingly poor health indices,” he said.
