President of the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), Dele Olaitan, has expressed concerns that healthcare workers, especially medical doctors who stay back to work in Nigeria, regularly move from one state of the federation to the other in search of better working conditions.
Olaitan spoke when he and some NARD executive paid a courtesy visit to the chairman of Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq, and Governor of Kwara State, in Abuja.
According to Olaitan, brain drain is affecting the improvement of healthcare delivery across the country, and medical doctors now move from one state to the other because of welfare packages.
Olaitan appealed to the NGF chairman to charge the state governors to equip medical facilities and do more to improve the welfare of the healthcare workers.
Olaitan said the major problems they have seen that are affecting the health care system and causing the disparities are mostly based on implementations of some basic welfare needs, and inadequate medical equipment in most state-owned health institutions.
“It is one factor to have our health workers leaving the country; yes, the pull factors are heavy. But if you have healthcare workers moving from one state to the other, then there is an issue with the state they are migrating from,” he explained.
He added, “And that is what we are hoping to solve. We are hoping that we can create a balance of whatever welfare and structure we have in these states.
“We need to empower tertiary healthcare institutions by getting them the manpower and ensure that this manpower doesn’t leave to other states”.
AbdulRazaq asked members of NARD to focus on the single goal of improving humanity. “If we do not resolve our health issues, we can never make progress as a nation. When somebody is ill, the person becomes immobile in all sorts of ways.
He said, “The issue of brain drain has come to stay, we can’t stop it. What we need to do is to train more personnel. So we should be able to train our youths. We need to train more people to mitigate the drain.
“When it comes to the issue of hazard allowance, we will push our colleagues to make sure those allowances are paid. We will do our best to make sure every state increases the allowance to be at par with each other.”
