How Nigeria intends to solve soaring medical brain drain in 2024
The Federal Government of Nigeria has begun considering more permanent solutions to addressing the mass exodus of health professionals for greener pastures at the expense of the country’s ailing health system.
Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, told the media that plans are far advanced for establishing a medical university to enhance the education of healthcare professionals and mitigate the challenge of brain drain in the health sector, Vanguard reported.
Sanwo-Olu said, “This is an opportunity to announce another bold initiative that we will be pursuing this year. This is strategic for us. This is a strategic intervention for us. Why are we setting up a health or medical university? It is to solve two problems. We found out that, working with the Federal Ministry of Health, we need to scale up very aggressively all of our training and all of the youths to be trained in everything within our health space.”
Adding that, “We cannot sit back and fold our arms as a government that cannot intervene. And so we will, as a state, hope that other states will take this initiative and set up similar universities to be able to scale up and have between 1,000 and 1,500 doctors graduating every year. And this will also stem, in our view, from the trend of medical personnel leaving our country. We are not going to stop at ensuring that we provide the best facilities to be able to retain our best talents here,” he is quoted by Vanguard.
In 2023, the National Assembly of Nigeria announced plans to impose a five-year in-country experience before granting full licenses to Nigerian-trained medics to prevent them from fleeing the nation. However, this move was entirely rejected by health professionals.
Nigeria continues to lose hundreds of doctors annually to brain drain, with a doctor-to-patient ratio more than five times worse than the WHO recommendation. A significant portion of these doctors leave for the UK. Over 5,000 Nigerian physicians have immigrated to the UK between 2015 and 2022, Premium Times NG reported.
Statistics provided by the Development Research and Project Centre (dRPC) indicated that about 233 Nigerian doctors immigrated to the UK in 2015. In 2016, the number rose to 279; in 2017, that number was 475; in 2018, that number increased to 852; in 2019, that number soared to 1,347; in 2020, that number was 833; and in 2021, it was reported to be 932.
