Brain drain: Nigeria loses 227 doctors last year

Nigeria has over the years been strug-gling with the crisis of brain drain in all sectors with the medics not an exception.
A total of 637 doctors left the country as at 2010 accounting for 36 per cent reduction in expert migration figures, the largest in the last two years.
The figure was contained in the “Nigeria Health Workforce Profile” relea-sed at the second national conference on human resource for health in Abuja.
Health minister Onyebuchi Chukwu said at the conference that Nigeria’s con-tinued loss of trained professionals to countries with better work incentives was the result of globalisation.
He said: “Some of our Nigerian bro-thers and sisters trained by Nigerian money are outside, but we can get them back, if we can pay for their services.”
In 2010 the number of doctors who migrate was low compared to 3,552 in 2007 which was the peak period.
Only 40 doctors serve 100,000 Nige-rians though the number of registered doctors in the country stood at 65,759, an 18 per cent rise from 2009 figures.
Meanwhile the 249,566 nurses and midwives registered in 2012 indicated a 3 per cent decline from figures recorded in 2009, shrinking their density to 148 nurses and midwives for every 100,000 Nigerian.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends 2.3 doctors, nur-ses and midwives per 1,000 population as minimum threshold of health worker density, according to WHO representative in Nigeria, Dr Rui Vaz Gama.
He said: “In a recent assessment made by WHO, 36 countries in the African region have shortages estimated at 820,000 doctors, nurses and midwives.”
Mike Egboh, country director for Partner-ship for Transforming Health Systems II (PATHS2), which supported the publication of the report, said Nigeria needed to build on the findings of its first conference and focus on humans rather than facilities.