Diaspora integration, not disparity, can stem Nigeria doctors’ emigration —Alonge, UCH ex-CMD

A former Chief Medical Director (CMD), University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Professor Temitope Alonge, has said in order to stem doctors’ emigration, Nigeria must ensure integration of doctors in the country and in the diaspora, rather than placing them on bonds through enactment of laws.

Alonge, in an interview with the Nigerian Tribune, said such integration will dispel the notion young doctors have that the country has preference for doctors with foreign degrees, because of their perceived competent than their counterparts in Nigeria.

According to him, while such an integration of doctors in Nigeria and abroad will ensure they can discover areas of partnership and beneficial relationships, it will also improve health care service delivery in Nigeria and ensure doctors working abroad, if they come back, can easily integrate into the system.

Professor Alonge declared that mitigating emigration of doctors requires an enabling environment to ply their trade; commensurate pay and enabling environment for the integration of those in the diaspora who come back home.

“They are not listening to what the young doctors who are leaving the country are saying. Many of them leave the country because they believe that the government and people of Nigeria seem to give anybody with a foreign degree, even if the degree is from the Benin Republic, undue attention.

“What the government needs is diaspora integration, not diaspora disparity. But all of us are diasporans in the sense that many of us have trained outside the country. That we chose to come back home does not make us incompetent, compared to our colleagues who choose to stay back.

“Now, diaspora integration which I did as a chief executive in open heart surgery worked. Today, you hear of the cardiac surgeries going on in Lagos, in Babcock and all over but this is because of diaspora integration. So, the doctors in Nigeria never felt inferior and their judgment was never discarded.

“For somebody who has been trained in the art of managing these complex cases to decide to go and see how things are being done in a modern way to come back and now be treated as a second-rated medical doctor, it will not allow the young doctors going out to come back.

“Very many good doctors leave this country and end up with brain in the drain, because they pick up specialties of convenience when they get outside of the country and the potentials that they had will never be realised.  Some actually end up abandoning the profession completely due to frustration and because they want relevance.

“The Federal Government should think twice about the pronouncements they make, particularly in the diaspora commission and do not infuse into the minds of the young ones that whatever their training is, it is inferior to whatever they are going to get outside of the country.

“If they then find a way to move out, these young ones will not come back,” he said.

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