To import foreign doctors or not
The Minster of Health was quoted in national dailies expressing the intention of the Nigerian government to import medical doctors from Europe and America, ostensibly, to complement the existing manpower on ground. According to him, the initiative is capable of curbing medical tourism, brain drain and could inject confidence into our health care system. The […]
The Minster of Health was quoted in national dailies expressing the intention of the Nigerian government to import medical doctors from Europe and America, ostensibly, to complement the existing manpower on ground. According to him, the initiative is capable of curbing medical tourism, brain drain and could inject confidence into our health care system.
The issue of medical tourism has remained a recurring decimal in health care discourse in Nigeria and every government relentlessly harps on it. But the question is who sponsors medical trips? Most medical tourism is sponsored by the state and federal governments. Only few individuals use their hard-earned money to seek treatment abroad.
How can importation of foreign doctors stop medical tourism? How many of these specialists and sub-specialists is the government planning to employ to cover the 36 states of Nigeria? Or are they all going to be based in Abuja?
The minister was specific that they are going to import doctors from Europe and the United States of America. According to Medscape Physician Compensation Report 2019, which is the most comprehensive and widely used physician salary report in the United States, an average annual salary of a specialist in US was 341,000 USD which translates to 28,416.7USD or N10, 258, 416.7 per month. The over N10 million one month salary of an American doctor that they are willing to employ is enough to sponsor a Nigerian consultant for subspeciality training in some of the best centres in the world. This in the long run will be more cost-effective to the country.
The minister opined that the employment of the expatriates could scale down the wave of brain drain bedevilling Nigerian health sector. On this point, I want to disagree with the minister. Every year, National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria, West African College of Surgeons and Physicians churn out hundreds of specialists but only a few of them are absorbed into the federal civil service under the guise of no money or no slots for employment.
Many of the physicians that left this country did so against the backdrop of poor remuneration and lack of slots for new employment. Agreed there are fractions of individuals that are hell -bent on leaving the country but largely failure of successive governments to provide conducive working environment has been the major drive for exodus of professionals from this country.
The minister was silent on infrastructural upgrade of our tertiary health institutions before the employment of the foreign doctors. Many federal medical centres and teaching hospitals in Nigeria are currently battling with provision of basic electricity to run. Substantial proportion of their Internally Generated Revenue are spent on fuelling and servicing generators. Some Nigerian doctors that had opportunity of additional training abroad could not operate at their full capacity due to lack of basic facilities they need here. Is it not more logical to invest the fund meant for the salary of the expatriates in purchase of equipment for our hospitals? I think we need to have a rethink of this idea.
The Federal Government in 2011 established the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) to manage and disburse education tax. The scheme has been providing infrastructural development to many tertiary institutions in the country and ensures capacity development of university lecturers. TETFUND through their scholarship sponsored the PhD of a significant number of university lecturers in reputable universities abroad. The quality of medical services in Nigeria could profoundly be improved in the long run if government expands the scope of TETFUND scholarship to cover medical fellowship or introduce similar programme for health care professionals. When this is done and then supported with provision of state of the art facilities, Nigeria could become a destination for medical tourism.
Abdullahi Sadiq Mohammed, Kano [email protected]