WHO: Nigerian Doctors Should Not Be Actively Recruited

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Nigeria has been listed as one of the 55 developing countries that should not engage their health workers in active recruitment.

A few days ago, the global health body came out with a new safeguard list of 55 countries that are most impacted by a health worker shortage. While most of these countries are low-medium income countries, 37 of the countries are in Africa and Nigeria is one of them.

Meanwhile, Nigeria has applied for the malaria vaccine,and with the support of the WHO, it is hoped that the country will introduce the malaria vaccine in countries by 2024.

Technical Officer Human Resource for Health in the WHO office in Nigeria, Dr. Olumuyiwa Ojo, who disclosed this during a chat with Health Journalists in Abuja, observed that the WHO is worried about the brain drain in Nigeria as it has a serious impact on Universal Health Coverage.

He noted that WHO has a code of Practice for the International Recruitment Of Health workers, which is a general binding code for all countries. Ojo explained that the affected are countries that better-developed countries should not engage in active recruitment of health workers from these countries.

“It is a global market, health workers are free to move to where they will get better value for their work but we are working with governments to have policies in place for the retention of health workers where they are needed most and also improve performance in terms of in-service training and other remunerations to improve their welfare. No matter how we build facilities, buy equipment, the equipment cannot do the jobs by themselves. In the UK where most Nigerians are going to, they are also losing some of their best hand to Australia and Canada where the pay is better. It is a global concern”.

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The WHO Country Representative in Nigeria, Dr. Walter Mulombo, said as part of efforts to address the shortage of health workers, the organization will be leading a new initiative called Tripple 25, which is a training programme aimed at training 25 percent of nurses and midwives in 25 low-income countries by 2025 for better health and better well-being for all.

He noted that at least 25 percent of Nigerian nurses and midwives will be trained under the Tripple 25 initiative on Basic health emergency care to address child and maternal mortality.

Mulombo stated that WHO is working to have a new pandemic treaty, which gives the organization much stronger roles to declare health events of international concern even if they happen in our territories.

“We have come a long way and will continue to evolve to make sure the world is a better place to live. HIV is one of the most successful programmes in Nigeria”. Health is a fundamental human right and a driver for peace and security, WHO was established as an international sanitary police to ensure that diseases that occur in territories do not spread beyond the borders to affect the rest of the world like we saw during the Covid-19.

“The organization has recorded some success stories, from the eradication of smallpox to drastic reduction of the Wild Polio Virus leading to the certification of Africa as WPV free even though we are still battling with the Circulating variant of Polio type 2 which we hope to interrupt once and for all by December, 2023″.

The malaria vaccine introduction is one of the breakthroughs over the last years and it has provided an opportunity to combine with other interventions to accelerate efforts towards malaria elimination.

Dr. Linda Ozor, the WHO Officer in charge of the Malaria Programme, explained that Nigeria had applied for the malaria vaccine but due to some challenges including timeliness, Nigeria was not considered for the first window, adding that Nigeria would be applying for the next window that will be closing by April 18, 2023.