At least 100 psychiatric doctors left the country to practise abroad in one year, Taiwo Obindo, the president of the Association of Psychiatrists in Nigeria (APN), said on Thursday.
Mr Obindo said this in Lagos while examining the brain drain rate in Nigeria’s psychiatric profession in 2023. He decried that the psychiatric profession was the worst hit by the trending brain drain syndrome ongoing in the Nigerian medical sector.
He said brain drain was affecting the psychiatric profession more than other professions in terms of the psychiatric nurses, psychiatric doctors and all other caregivers and health workers in the field.
According to him, for every five psychiatric doctors trained in Nigeria, three leave the country to practise abroad.
Mr Obindo lamented that the country had the requisites to train medical personnel but could not maintain, retain and sustain them.
The professor noted that having a psychiatric qualification, experience, or certificate was a visa because medical institutions abroad were looking for such personnel and were ready to offer them enticing remuneration.
Also, the medical director of the Federal Neuro-psychiatric Hospital Yaba, Olugbenga Owoeye, said the hospital focused on training and retraining more psychiatric doctors to fill the vacuum created by brain drain syndrome in the hospital.
Mr Owoeye, who decried the effects of brain drain in the hospital, said it had resulted in a drastic reduction of manpower, particularly the psychiatric doctors and nurses.
According to him, the hospital has resolved to train more doctors to close the vacuum created by the constant migration of psychiatrists overseas.
He said that the hospital had trained at least 90 consultant psychiatric doctors and nurses practising in different states and abroad.
“So far, not less than 90 consultant psychiatrists have been trained by the hospital,” Mr Owoeye said.
Mr Owoeye identified general upgrading of the hospital by equipping it with the required modern facilities and training programmes as some of the things the hospital is doing to encourage health workers.
He listed the renovation of the drug rehabilitation centre, provision of the intensive care units and establishment of a new functional stand-alone molecular laboratory as efforts to encourage the doctors’ operations.
He, however, expressed optimism that the migration of health workers to other countries to practise would eventually stop someday.
(NAN)