Farouk Umar Abubakar, registrar of Nursing and Midwifery Council of Nigeria (NMCN), is deeply troubled by the mass exodus of nurses to greener pastures in Europe and North America. He told Channels Television last week that 42, 000 nurses left Nigeria in the last three years.
The grim picture painted by the registrar of NMCN is more appalling in Nigeria’s general hospitals. Two months ago there were reports that five wards in the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) were shutdown because there were no nurses. Everyone needs nurses but most of them are on starving wages. That explains the mass exodus.
In the last quarter of 2023, the secretary to the government of the federation permitted the Federal Medical Center (FMC) in Abeokuta, Ogun state to replace the 200 doctors and nurses that left the services of the FMC.
An incident on January 11, 2024 suggests that Abeokuta FMC management is still hunting for heads to fill the vacant posts. The children of an ailing 78-year-old woman took their mother for treatment in Abeokuta FMC. They waited for hours without seeing anyone to attend to their mother.
In apparent desperation they evacuated their mother to a private clinic in Otta where she died apparently due to inadequate expertise to handle her ailment.
I had a glimpse of the grim picture painted by the registrar of NMCN when I attended my daughter’s induction into the nursing profession on November 17, 2022 at the Lagos State School of Nursing, Igando. A total of 60 nurses and midwives were inducted into the profession that day.
During the event the representative of Lagos state commissioner for health offered jobs to all the new nurses.
Ironically, as if they were competing for attention, the chief medical director of Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH) told the inductees that any of them who shows up at LASUTH on Monday would start work immediately.
The event was on a Thursday, so the inductees needed just four days to be gainfully employed. The CMD asked those who were interested in his offer to raise their hands. Everyone was shocked as only five of the 60 inductees opted to pick up the offer at LASUTH.
The CMD’s offer was a six digit appointment which was snubbed by most of the inductees. I wondered whether that was still the Nigeria with an unemployment rate of 33.3 per cent.
The fears of the registrar of NMCN are well placed. The poor in Nigeria are paying the price of the mass exodus of nurses.
However, that does not justify the council’s transferred aggression and regulatory despotism visited on innocent nurses trained with parents’ hard earned money.
The NMCN in response to the dearth of nurses in the country has placed insurmountable obstacles on the paths of those leaving Nigeria for jobs abroad.
For the council to respond to verification inquiries on a nurse seeking a job abroad, the new requirement is that the nurse should have two years cognate experience as a registered nurse.
Besides, the council now requires the chief executive of the hospital the nurse worked with (almost certainly a medical doctor) to testify to the good standing of the nurse seeking the council’s endorsement.
Given the raging dichotomy between nurses and medical doctors, that requirement amounts to handing over nurses for doctors to frustrate.
Worst still, the council is inadvertently indicting itself by asking doctors to testify to the proficiency of nurses it registered as qualified personnel.
Abubakar contends that he is doing that in Nigeria’s interest. However, the emigrating nurses are not responsible for the decay in Nigeria’s healthcare system. They should therefore not be punished as solution to the mass exodus. The problem was created by decades of corruption and criminal neglect by successive governments of the federation.
In the 1970s the federal government experienced a critical supply deficit in the nursing profession and took pre-emptive steps to solve the problem.
Nursing education was not only tuition-free, but student nurses were placed on salary grade level 4. That amounted to a take-home pay of N120 at a time when the naira was 75kobo to the dollar.
That is something close to N150,000 at today’s exchange rate. Under that circumstance, the nurses were legally bounded for two years after their courses.
The supply deficit in the nursing profession is more critical today than it was in the 1970s. Government should work out humane measures that would attract and keep qualified hands in the profession. There should be enough incentives to make Nigeria attractive to the prospective nursing graduates.
Government should make nursing courses tuition free and pay the students the salary grade level 4 that was paid up to the 1990s.
That is the only way the NMCN could legally bound the nurses and impose a period they have to compulsorily work for government before they could emigrate.
What the council plans to do at the moment borders on forced labour. The nurses seeking employment abroad were trained by their parents at exorbitant cost. The cheapest fee in a school of nursing in Nigeria is N500,000 per session. Some of the private schools charge as high as N1.5 million per session. Someone would labour to train a child at that cost only for one desperate regulator to place insurmountable obstacles on her path. It is the height of regulatory rascality.
NMCN should learn a lesson from the Medical and Dentistry Council of Nigeria (MDCN), the regulatory body of the medical profession which is facing the same personnel supply deficit as the nursing council.
MDCN tried to fight the supply deficit by delaying the issuance of doctors’ license for five years in a bid to ensure that they do not leave Nigeria. Doctors and other stakeholders in the profession protested the policy and the MDCN backed down.
Nurses are obdurately indignant over the council’s new obstructionist policies. The council must listen to them and advice government on humane solutions to the mass exodus.
