The Medical and Dental Association of Nigeria (MDCAN) has said that to address the impact of brain drain, the number of medical students must be increased.
Dr Victor Makanjuola, the President of MDCAN, suggested that if the number of medical students are increased, there could be more doctors to mitigate the low level of doctor-to-patient ratio.
He lamented that following the brain drain of doctors in the country, only 30 percent of the 4,000 doctors that graduated from medical schools annually remain in the country.
In an education summit in Abuja on Wednesday, he explained that increasing the number of medical students in the country would increase the population of doctors in the country.
He suggested that Nigeria needs to maintain good medical education in the country and maintaining good service delivery to the people, saying that it could be done if the country increases the number of medical doctors that it is producing.
According to him, “We retain just 30 to 35 per cent of those we train on an annual basis. If we are retaining 30 percent of about 4,000 produced annually, we are going to go into deeper crises. What we are looking at is if we can find some mechanism for increasing the number to 12,000 or 8,000 because if we retain 30 percent of this number, it is better than that of 4,000. With this, we can support the system, not optimally but keep the system going.”
He advised the federal government to increase medical schools by using different methods of teaching as the country is not having adequate staff strength to man the schools.
He opined that to stop the brain drain of medical doctors, the government needs to ensure access to basic amenities and security, saying that at a point, doctors became targets of kidnappers and the government should increase the remuneration of the workers and invest in their training.
