From Fred Ezeh, Abuja
Managing Director, Alliance Hospital, Abuja, Dr. Chris Otabor, has raised the alarm of imminent manpower crisis in Nigeria’s health care system due to increasing interest of medical doctors, nurses and other health care professionals for foreign practice.
Dr. Otabor told journalists at an interactive session in Abuja that public health care facilities in Nigeria are increasingly getting empty because of the mass exodus of the health care professionals to foreign countries for, perhaps, better remuneration and working condition.
“Amidst that, the available ones are not evenly distributed across the country. Lagos, Abuja, Port Harcourt, and few others cities have quite a number of doctors servicing the patients, while several local governments in Nigeria can’t boast of a medical doctor or several specialists needed for effective health care service delivery.
“In these areas, majority of the people now rely on herbal mixtures or medical prescriptions from unregistered ‘acclaimed’ health workers,” he said.
Dr. Otabor said there’s hardly a flight leaving Nigeria for UK, Europe or other parts of the world that one or two medical doctors and few other health care professionals are not on board, thus challenging the governments to salvage the situation by taking the necessary steps as already suggested.
He said: “Brain drain as well as medical tourism is doing much more harm to Nigerian health care system, and if nothing is done urgently, there might be manpower crisis sooner than expected.”
He disclosed that the number of Nigerian doctors abroad particularly in the UK is far higher than the number of doctors in Nigeria, insisting that UK health system will shake or even collapse if Nigerian doctors in UK withdraw their services.
He said: “An estimated one billion dollars is lost to medical tourism annually, and solution to kidney, heart, brain and other special cases are some of the needs that push Nigerians to the foreign countries.”