4,000 Nigerian Doctors Migrating Soon; It’s Now One To 10,000 Patients – NARD

The Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors, NARD, has alerted of the plan by 4,000 of its members to disengage their services in the country and migrate abroad for greener pastures, noting that it was now a ratio of one doctor to 10,000 patients in the country.

This came as the association expressed worries over government’s treatment of members.

It said with government’s nonchalant attitudes to members’ salaries, welfare and other deserved packages, the country may be heading to a point where it would have no doctors anymore.

NARD revealed that Nigeria had already lost 2,000 doctors to the outside world in the last two years.

It tasked the government to halt the drift by doing the needful to avoid what it called disaster in the nation’s health sector.

The national president of NARD, Dr Emeka Orji, told Vanguard on the telephone on Sunday that one doctor was at the moment attending to 10,000 patients.

This, he noted, was far above the World Health Organisation, WHO’s recommended ratio of one doctor to 600 patients.

Although he admitted that mobility of labour was recognized anywhere in the world, he, however, said there were several reasons why people can decide to leave their countries or migrate to other places, tasking government to find out the reasons and address them.

-Vanguard