The Chairman of the National Associations of Resident Doctors, NARD, Osun State Teaching Hospital, Dr. John Ojo has lamented overload of work which doctors encounter on a daily basis in Nigeria.
He sought an upward review of the allowances and consolidated salaries of medical doctors.
Ojo also said Nigerian medical doctors were dying, suffering, collapsing and were on medications as a result of work-related stress.
Newsmen gathered that Nigeria still loses hundreds of doctors annually to brain drain.
Ojo stated this on Wednesday while fielding questions on the challenges of the health sector In Nigeria on a radio current affairs programme in Osogbo.
According to him, “The health sector is at the verge of collapse. In most teaching hospitals, where you are meant to have twenty doctors you just have two or three doctors working.
“By the recommendation of the World Health Organisation, it is supposed to be one doctor to six hundred patients, but as we speak in the country, we have one doctor to ten thousand patients.
“The waiting time has increased for doctors to see patients and that is why you see patients throwing tantrums because they have been waiting for a long time to see a doctor.
“So, for us to come up with those demands, we considered the economic situation of the country. The way NARD wanted it, the Nigerian Health Sector should be attractive to foreigners, not the other way round.”
He lamented the brain drain among medical specialists, adding that if the trend was not arrested, it would affect the training of medical practitioners.
“If you are saying that the younger ones should stay, who will train them?
“In the next ten years, if we continue at this level, I don’t know what will happen to our country because the trainers are leaving, the younger ones are leaving.
“So who is going to be trained, who is going to train who?” He queried.