Health authorities in Nigeria are concerned about the flight of medical personnel to foreign nations. The primary factors stated for the exodus of Nigerian medical professionals include better salaries and healthcare facilities.
Professor Alphonsus Nwosu, the Nigerian health minister, made a commitment to act. He declared, “We will definitely address the issue of doctors and nurses quitting in large numbers to take jobs in Europe and North America.
However, unless the government was willing to make significant investments in the health sector, Mrs. Stella Ekpendu, the head of the school of nursing at the University College Hospital in Ibadan, claimed that there was little the government could do to stop the exodus to wealthy nations.
“The exodus of nurses, for example, from Nigeria to abroad, will not stop until the government addresses the issue of poor salary and the decay in the Nigerian health sector,” she said.
According to reports, foreign embassies in Nigeria, particularly those of Britain, the United States, and Saudi Arabia, receive on a weekly basis 20 to 25 verification requests from Nigerian nurses wishing to migrate abroad. This translates into about 1196 applications a year.
Given the poor pay at home, this is hardly surprising. An average nurse in Britain earns £15 000 ($22 900; €23 400) a year, whereas the best-paid nurses in Nigeria earn about 300 000 naira (£1700; $2500; €2600) a year, though most earn between 60 000 and 120 000 naira.
Nigeria is certainly not the only African nation losing medical personnel to industrialized nations. Almost all of the nations of Africa are impacted.
Over 2000 African nurses left their home countries to work in Britain during the 12-month period ending in March 2002, according to statistics from the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Great Britain.
Zimbabwe lost 473 nurses, and South Africa lost 2114 nurses and midwives to Britain. Nigeria, which lost 432 nurses to Britain (up from 347 in 2000–2001), Ghana (195, up from 140), Zambia (183, up from 88), and Kenya are among African nations that have lost nurses to Britain (155, up from 50).
However, as noted by Dejene Aredo, an economist at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, other professionals are also impacted by migration from the continent to affluent nations.
According to him, up to 20 000 experts leave Africa each year to work in wealthy nations. Because its highly skilled individuals are leaving the country in search of employment, he calculated the economic loss at roughly $4 billion annually.
He said, “It is a concern because there is a tremendous personnel shortfall in emerging countries,” he continued.
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Source: NCBI
