The Federal Government on Sunday disclosed that 55,000 licensed doctors are in the country to attend to the growing population of patients following the exodus of doctors and health professionals to hospitals and health facilities abroad.
It said in the last five years, the country lost about 15,000 to 16,000 doctors to the Japa syndrome while about 17,000 had been transferred.
The Coordinating Minister of Health and Social Welfare, Prof Ali Pate, disclosed these when he featured as a guest on Channels Television’s Politics Today.
Pate, who said the brain drain syndrome has robbed the health sector of its best hands, affirmed that the government is doing its best to expand the training scheme and motivate others who chose to stay back and serve their fatherland.
The brain drain phenomenon, otherwise known as ‘Japa’, has seen a generation of young doctors, health workers, tech entrepreneurs and a number of professionals abandoned Nigeria for greener pasture abroad.
But the minister reiterated that though there are 300,000 health professionals in Nigeria, only 55,000 of them are doctors.
He said, “There are about 300,000 health professionals working in Nigeria today in all cadres. I am talking about doctors, nurses, midwives, pharmacists, laboratory scientists and others. We did an assessment and discovered we have 85,000 to 90,000 registered Nigerian doctors. Not all of them are in the country. Some are in the Diaspora, especially in the US and UK. But there are 55,000 licensed doctors in the country.
“The issue overall, in terms of health professionals, is that they are not enough. They are insufficient in terms of the skills mix. Can you believe most of the high skilled professional doctors are in Lagos, Abuja and a few urban centres? There is a huge distribution issue.
“The population of doctor overall is about 7,600 doctors in Lagos and 4,700 or thereabout in Abuja. The doctor to population ratio in Abuja is 14.7 per 10,000 population. These are numbers that you can verify. In Lagos, it is about 4.6, even though the average is 2.2 by 10,000.
“There are huge distributional issues and they are, of course, the opportunities even for some of those who have been trained to get into the market. So you have to look at it from a perspective that is holistic. Not only doctors but other cadres that are important in the delivery of health care. For doctors, we have been losing many that have been trained.”
