Okowa Faults Restriction On Medical Practitioners From Leaving Nigeria

Delta State governor, Ifeanyi Okowa has faulted restricting medical practitioners from moving out of the country, declaring that such experts could be exported to needy nations.

Nigeria has the challenge of nurses, midwives and doctors exiting the country while the situation has begun to trouble the healthcare system in the country.

He stated this Monday while inaugurating the Collegiate System in the State’s Schools of Nursing held at the College of Nursing, Agbor, Ika South local government area of the state, saying Nigeria had capacity to export medical officers to needy nations if available potential were adequately harnessed and proper planning done.

He said that more of them could be trained and from the pool, enough would remain in the country, frowning at the prevailing development where medical professionals no longer empathized with humanity, saying that it had become commonplace and unethical.

According to the governor, Nigeria can leverage the massive demand for medical professionals trained in the country by signing bilateral agreements with foreign nations to train and export more of the professionals to these countries.

The governor, however, said, “I think that as a nation, if we know where our strength lies, we can do things that can enable us to improve on where our strength lies.

“There is nothing wrong if there is a planned programme by Nigeria to train many more nurses than we need, and we enter into a bilateral relationship with other countries to export some of our nurses, midwives and doctors.

“I am not one of those that will come out to say that we are trying to make laws to stop or restrict the movement of medical personnel out of the country.

“What we need to do is to ensure that there is a planned programme by Nigeria to truly train more than our daily and yearly need and ensure that we are able to enter into strategic alliances with other countries’’.

The secretary-general and registrar, Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria, Farouk Abubakar, said Nigerian nurses and midwives were performing well globally and that the country had produced no fewer than 21,000 nurses in the past six years.

He said that domestication of the community-nursing programme in most states in the country had contributed immensely to producing adequate nursing and midwifery grassroots manpower for primary healthcare services.

The state commissioner for health, Dr Mordi Ononye, said the transition from School to College System wouldn’t have been possible without the unalloyed support of Governor Okowa to the ministry.