2,000 Medical Personnel Have Left Nigeria In 2 Years – Provost

Provost of the College of Health Sciences, Federal University of Lokoja, Prof. Michael Ozovehe Ogirima, said in the last two years, over 2,000 medical personnel have left the country for greener pastures overseas.

He made this known yesterday during the 32nd inaugural lecture, “Improvising To Greatness—The Surgeon’s Sojourn,” at the institution in Lokoja.

The orthopaedic surgeon stressed that the cumulative investment in education and health is still far from the expected UNICEF and WHO/AU benchmarks of 26% and 15% of annual budgets, respectively.

Ogirima noted that funding research activities to set up research laboratories at the department level is Herculean. Without molecular inquests in medical research, more research grants are not easy to come by these days.

His words, “Brain drain is a phenomenal problem of the decade. Medical academics are leaving the country in droves. This is not limited to young ones but also to old and experienced hands. It is costing the government a huge amount of money. This cohabits with a high rate of medical tourism.

“The teaching hospitals are not adequately funded or supervised. There is relative neglect because they belong to the Ministry of Health, while the university is under the NUC/Ministry of Education. We, the clinical staff, are caught in between two poorly funded supervisors’ double jeopardy. The patients, being our obedient ‘guinea pigs’ cannot be subjected to risky experiments without ethical issues,” he said.

Prof. Ogirima, therefore, recommended that TETFUND’s interventions be extended to teaching hospitals, which are the training and research centres for medical and postgraduate students.

“However, if this is not possible, a special medical education trust fund should be implemented to care dor our poorly equipped health centres. There is a need to enforce various existing policies on health insurance and social welfare schemes for the institutions and the vulnerable.

“The government is encouraged to establish more specialised universities, as there is always competitive funding among various university programmes. The medical programmes are expensive to run and the tendency for neglect and underfunding exists. It is recommended that the medical education of any university should have between 30 percent to 40 percent of the annual capital budget of that institution.

“Clustering of medical colleges may be necessary to make available the few medical teachers in the country accessible to students through the utilisation of ICT and e-learning facilities and Al AI-assisted tools. A medical college could therefore be affiliated with many teaching hospitals and well-equipped private hospitals,” the provost said.