They have left their home country with good intentions. They are in search of better wages and working conditions. To easily acquire new skills in the profession and raise their families in places of better social amenities. Places where they will find greater prospects of actualizing their life ambitions.
They are emmigrant Nigerian Medical doctors. They have continued to drain Nigeria's health sector base yearly as a result of their mass exodus of migration.
Since the inception of the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN), there have been 65,000 registered medical doctors but presently, only 25,000 of them are practicing in the country. Official statistics have it that there is one doctor to 6,400 patients in Nigeria as against World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation of one doctor to 600 patients. If we must meet the WHO standard, then there must be an additional 283,333 doctors measuring by a population of 170million. Reports have it that 77% of black doctors practicing in the United States of America (USA) are Nigerians.
Truth be told, the situation is not getting better at any level of practice, from the house officers to the consultants and even medical students. They are all leaving the country for the ‘promised land’.
Why won’t they leave when they lack satisfactory working conditions and are made to work in rodent infested work places?
Why won’t they leave when they are encumbered in the workplace by suffocating and very irritating equality beauty contest for position, status, salary and relevance with the them (doctors)?
My Economics teacher in Secondary school told me that duration and cost of training is a factor that determine the salary of workers yet everyone want to earn the same salary and attain same status as a medical doctor?
Why won’t they leave when they can no longer concentrate, can’t put in their best as result of lack of modern equipment to work with?
Why won’t they leave when Nigerians blame them for not being able to discover cure for diseases forgetting that they (Nigerians) have failed to fund their research?
Why won’t they leave when they have become subjects of kidnap, vilified in newspapers, owned salaries and allowances for months?
Why won’t they leave, when their hazard allowance is not even enough to feed the Lions at the University of Ibadan Zoological garden?
Why won’t they leave when the society they toil day and night to ensure is healthy now stabs them at the back, remind them of Hippocratic Oath when they engage in strike to demand for the needful forgetting that they (the society) have failed to fulfill their part of the oath.
Why should we blame the society, after all they know nothing about the oath?
Why won’t they leave when Universal Health Coverage is not for all masses?
Why won’t they leave when the society has now tagged them as proud, killers, negligent, selfish and in the profession for nothing but money?
Why won’t they leave when those aspiring to become specialist have lost hope in the dream as a result of inadequate space?
Why won’t they leave when patients take all sort of medications including traditional concoction expecting them (Doctors) to do miracle?
When won’t they leave when patients can no longer pay their bills because those gangsters they voted in as leaders have not provided them with job and the doctor is spending his peanut salary for the patient simply because he is told that he is rendering service to humanity? They are tired of treating patients for free and thus, have to go?
Why won’t they leave when there is now unemployment in the profession?
Why won’t they go when the crowd in the hospital is outstretching the facilities there?
Why won’t they leave when a Local Government chairman now prefers to go outside the country to seek medical attention for mild headache?
Why won’t they leave when Hippocrates is now uncomfortable in his grave with the happening to his followers (doctors)?
Why won’t they leave when those that have graduated can hardly find space for house job?
Why won’t they leave when the budgetary allocation to the health sector is far below standard?
Why won’t they leave when the Government had grown bigger than workers union? Threatening striking workers with sack. Ask the 16,000 resident doctors that were sacked and recalled recently.
Why won’t the medical students leave when their stay in medical school is being truncated and prolonged by accreditation crises, teachers, strike and poor infrastructure? How can they be learning and not have tools for practicals?
Who is suffering? Of course the Nigeria health sector which is already deficient of specialist doctors.
The drama has now changed. They no longer leave for the USA and Europe. They now leave for other African countries with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) far less than the supposed giant of Africa, after all they are appreciated there.
Eddy Uwoghiren
Department of Medicine,
University of Benin Teaching Hospital (UBTH),
Benin City, Nigeria.
