Nigeria’s Shrinking Medical Labour Force

Nigeria has the second-largest number of people living with HIV/AIDS. It also has the highest number of malnourished children and is the first country with the highest number of people without basic health care. In Nigeria, 840 out of 100,000 maternal deaths and 143 out of 1,000 children under 5 dies, and 2,300 of her children under 5 and 140 of her children die every day in Nigeria. woman is dead

Brain drain is a problem that needs immediate attention. While not a new occurrence, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the rate at which healthcare workers leave Nigeria. Unless the “drivers” of migration, career progression, higher wages, and better quality of life for health workers are addressed, health worker retention will continue to be a challenge and worsen Nigeria’s health situation.

According to a national statistics report released by the UK government in August 2022, 13,609 health professionals left Nigeria for the UK between 2021 and 2022. Nigeria has the largest pool of health workers in Africa and a great capacity to train them, but there are still many gaps. Policies that promote retention need to be developed and implemented. Appropriate compensation should also be considered to limit the brain drain in rural and urban areas and while health workers leave the country.

Nigeria, with a population of 200 million, is struggling to reform its health care system to improve the sector, but funding, combined with an inadequate workforce, is a major obstacle. According to the latest World Bank data, the West African country has 0.4 doctors per 1,000 people, less than the world average of 1.8 doctors.

There is also a fledgling health insurance sector that is struggling to increase enrollment. Nigeria is struggling to finance a huge deficit spending on imported gasoline subsidies and debt servicing explodes and eats up much of the government revenue.

Africa’s most populous country is facing slow growth due to a shrinking labor market, double-digit inflation, and growing insecurity. So far, the system has been funded primarily by donations from millions of people working in governments and large corporations. But there is an untapped opportunity in the informal sector, and to be profitable, a system that addresses the challenges related to healthcare pricing and reimbursement to hospitals and patients is needed, analysts say. I am adding.

Lack of access to quality healthcare undermines the quality of life of Nigerians and their ability to escape extreme poverty. The fact that successive governments have consistently allocated less than 10% of their budgets to healthcare means that the country’s chronic healthcare underfunding accounts for less than 15% of the national budget devoted to healthcare, indicating that they are at the heart of the challenges facing the sector.

According to the latest World Health Organization (WHO) statistics for 2019, 71% of healthcare costs in Nigeria are out-of-pocket. This indicates that the majority of Nigerians do not have health insurance and the poorest Nigerians have little chance of receiving quality healthcare.

In the pre-Parliamentary 2023 Appropriations Bill, a total of N1.17 trillion will be made available by the executive branch for the health sector. This allocation is well below the 15% of the 13% recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the African Union (AU) in his 2001 Abuja Declaration, but lawmakers have not manipulated the allocation. There is nothing to suggest. Critical sector planning is pointless. It’s been that pattern every year. As a result of this state of health in the health sector, some Nigerians regularly fly to India and other countries to receive quality medical aid and services at a very high cost to the economy.

The only way to reverse this trend is for the executive and legislative branches to deliberately work together to increase healthcare funding. Increasing budget allocations to healthcare and ensuring that those funds are not released could exacerbate the multiple challenges facing the sector. Many primary care clinics in rural areas lack nurses and midwives as health workers migrate abroad or to urban areas due to a lack of medical equipment, unacceptable working conditions, slow career advancement, and low wages.