Why our doctors, nurses are in high demand abroad

 Prof. Adetokunbo Fabamwo is a consultant Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, and Chief Medical Director (CMD) of Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja, Lagos.

Fabamwo in this interview with The Guardian gave reasons Nigeria-trained doctors and nurses are in high demand in Europe and America and what the hospital is doing to stem the tide.

You were recently quoted to have said that five nurses resign daily from the hospital for greener pastures. What is LASUTH doing to stem the tide?
The challenge we have is an exodus of health workers travelling abroad because governments of the developed world have decided to focus on Africa to source manpower- doctors and nurses to fill their own missing gaps, especially in Britain and Canada, among others.

This is because people are no longer studying medicine there, and the COVID-19 pandemic has affected a lot of manpower in those countries. So, they look for manpower to fill the gaps in their health system and they recognise the fact that Nigeria has highly-trained health workers and they are highly skilled. So, they focus especially on Nigeria; they have made it easy for doctors and nurses to apply for jobs in their countries. However, as health workers travel abroad for greener pastures and it affects us.

However, the Governor of Lagos State in his magnanimity has approved a training programme, where we train and employ health workers so that there will be no gaps. But when you lose highly skilled doctors, and you said you are training new doctors, actually they are not the same in terms of experience.

The management of LASUTH has responded actively, for three weeks, after the nurses’ resignation. The first thing we did was to look forward to assistants. We recognise the fact that nurses have different functions, which they learnt in school and other functions they perform are not necessarily professional in a way, that non-professional staff members can perform. For instance, dressing beds, bathing patients and disposing of the wastes of patients, including urine. So, anybody can really perform these functions.

We decided to take off the burden of these minor functions away from the remaining nurses, who are still with us and employ others who are not nurses by profession to perform these functions. So, right now we have a number of people who work in the wards, we call them ward assistants and they help nurses to do minor work.

The other thing we did was to look at the entry qualification for nurses into the hospital. Ideally, we should be recruiting fresh graduating nurses and those that have advanced qualifications in the profession, for instance, professional nurses, midwives or psychiatric nurses, among others. So, these are called double qualified nurses, which the government recommended for us to employ.

But we have problems in getting this set of nurses because they will go for an additional qualification programme after two years to enable them to stay in the system. We recognise the fact that there are two ways nurses retire in the profession; it is either they have attained the age of 60 or they have worked for 35 years. But there are nurses who finished school at the age of 20 years and started work immediately, by the age of 55. These nurses have worked for 35 years; they have to retire at the age of 55.

At 55 years, they are still active, so, we look at the possibility of engaging some of them on a contract basis, which will be renewed yearly until they get tired and will no longer be useful.

What have been your other challenges as CMD of LASUTH?
Our major challenge is the lack of space. I will like to say that LASUTH was just a cottage hospital in the 40s and it gradually became a general hospital in the 50s and 60s through the 70s and 80s.

In 2001, the government in its wisdom decided that Ikeja General Hospital should be transformed into the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), to offer a platform for practical training for medical students that have already been admitted to Lagos State College of Medicine (LASCOM) as at that time.

The LASCOM started in the year 1997 and admitted the first set of students and LASUTH came into existence later in 2001, to offer a laboratory where these medical students will be trained. You can see that it moved from a cottage to a teaching hospital. It was supposed to be accompanied by huge infrastructural development.