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Prof. Afolabi Lesi, Provost, College of Medicine, University of Lagos (UNILAG), has urged medical professionals to invest in Nigeria health sector to stem brain drain.
Afolabi made the plea on Tuesday while speaking with newsmen shortly after the Induction and Award ceremony for graduating students in the Department of Physiotherapy.
According to him, we need to invest our resources in Nigeria to make things work better, especially in the health sector.
“This is because Nigeria needs each and every one of us as medical practitioners, especially those that the country had invested in their training.
“We owe the next generation of Nigerians a duty to render our services, though the environment will never be perfect, nobody will come from abroad to fix Nigeria for us.
“It is we, Nigerians that will fix Nigeria; Nigerians must feel that they have a stake in this country,” he said.
Lesi said that young people needs skills, pointing out that the truth was that there was a lot our young ones could achieve when they go abroad.
He said that UNILAG had encouraged its students to get the best training that could convince them, but for them to stay back in the country was a personal decision.
The provost said that if the government could create an enabling environment for the medical professionals, they would come back home to give in their best to the country.
Also, Dr Chris Okafor, a Senior Lecturer in the Department, said that 51 physiotherapists graduated into the medical industry.
Okafor said it was a significant number knowing that physiotherapists were not many in the country.
He said that “we don’t have many of them, lots of them had travelled abroad for greener pasture”.
The senior lecturer said statistics had shown that we have less than four thousands of them in Nigeria, as a good number of them had travelled abroad.
Okafor said that Nigeria needs to produce more physiotherapists, probably with improvement in the country.
He said “if we have a population of 50,000 physiotherapists, they are still not enough, but I believe that with time, it would come up’’.
The senior lecturer said that the major challenge facing the sector was brain drain, adding, “lot of physiotherapists are travelling out, even the ones you saw graduating today are among them”.
He said that physiotherapists were basically those healthcare providers that worked on the patients and clients.
Okafor said that they use physical means and intervention in terms of exercise, electrical modalities and massage, to treat patients. (NAN)
