By Dennis Agbo

MEMBERS of the Nigeria Medical Association, NMA, in Enugu state, have asked government at all levels to thinker with wage improvement comparable to what is obtained overseas, so as to arrest the sweeping brain drain in the Nigeria’s medical profession.

The doctors said that there is probably no healthcare practitioner again remaining in Nigeria to take care of the aged persons, disclosing that even some healthcare institutions in Nigeria now offer care-giver crash programmes with beautiful certificates with which they now use to get jobs in United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.

Delivering a lecture on the effect of brain drain on health workers in Nigeria, in the NMA’s 2024 Physician’s week, in Enugu on Tuesday, Emeritus professor of plastic/reconstructive surgery, Francis Akpuaka identified fuel subsidy removal, poor wage and low Heath insurance scheme as key factors facilitating the brain drain in Nigeria.

Akpuaka said, “the country is bleeding, even the current minimum wage can’t stop the exodus. The problem has to be solved from the source. The sad news now is that young health workers are leaving in droves, who will take care of us here?”

The NMA chairman in Enugu state, Dr Sunday Okafor urged governors in Nigeria to reverse the internal brain drain for quality healthcare delivery, using the opportunity of the new minimum wage to reverse it and boost quality healthcare delivery across the country.

Discussing the theme of the conference , ‘Ensuring universal applicability in remuneration: a panacea to talent retention in healthcare’, Okafor lamented that professional health care workers working in most primary health centers and the ones owned by the state governments see such facilities as transit camps, where they wait till they get their dream jobs at the federal establishments.

“This means that the very critical level of healthcare, which is the primary healthcare, suffers a lot because of poor remuneration of healthcare workers at that level.”

To stem cell he tide, the NMA state Chairman called on governors to ensure remuneration of health workers in their states is at par with their contemporaries at the federal level of care.

“It brings parity in welfare for all health workers, irrespective of where you are working and your location. Whether you are working with the federal institution, state or primary healthcare at the local levels, at every given point in time, as a medical doctor or health worker, you should be able to compare notes with your contemporaries of the same level.

“This is also important because we have one market. All of us shop from the same market. All of us are also exposed to the same economic condition. So, it makes no sense to see health workers at the federal level earn much higher than their counterparts at the state level, which also earn far more than their contemporaries at the local government level.

“What this simply means is that if we do not address this with the concept of universal applicability, the healthcare at lower level will suffer. The lower levels of healthcare will become transit camps. This means that those at the local government and the state, will only see those levels as temporary place, meaning that the moment they get employed at the federal level, they will just leave.

“You see them most of the time spending three to six months and as soon as they get employed at the federal level, they move. It becomes just like a transit camp for them. What it means is that the very critical level of healthcare, which is the primary healthcare, suffers a lot.

“Majority of our population are rural dwellers. The very first point of call when they get ill is the primary health centre. By the time you turn those primary health centres as transit camps, there will be dearth of manpower; there will be no doctor because they must have all migrated either to the state or federal levels.

“So, you can see that it is very critical that we address this critical problem if we must retain our skilled health workers”, Okafor said.