THE EFFECT OF MASSIVE BRAIN DRAIN AFFECTING THE MEDICAL AND HEALTHCARE SECTOR

Health worker migration, commonly called 'medical brain drain', refers to the mass migration of trained and skilled health professionals (doctors, nurses, midwives) from low-income to high-income countries.

This is currently leaving a significant number of poor countries, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, with critical staff shortages in the health care sector.

A broad consensus exists that where medical brain drain exacerbates such shortages, it is unethical, and this review presents the main arguments underpinning this view.

Notwithstanding the general agreement, which policies are justifiable on ethical grounds to tackle brain drain and how to go best about implementing them remains controversial.

The review offers a discussion of the specific ethical issues.

Brain drain is also?associated with job stress and occupational burnout, which affect health workers' job performance, lead to low quality of service delivery to users, and fuels their intentions to leave their jobs, Health workforce brain drain: from denouncing the challenge to solving the problem

Nigeria suffers from a huge brain drain issue across different sectors, particularly in the healthcare sector.

The WHO assessed that there is a current shortage of 2.8 million physicians in the world A heuristic phenomenological method was used in this study to explore the lived experiences of 12 Nigerian healthcare practitioners that migrated to the United States.

The push-pull theory served as the theoretical framework that grounded this study. The central research questions for this study focused primarily on the reasons healthcare practitioners are leaving Nigeria and what the impact of those decisions have on the Nigerian healthcare sector.

Qualitative data were collected and analyzed identified three emerging themes: (a) challenges of living in Nigeria; (b) lack of government support; and (c) reality of knowledge gap.

The participants were selected by using a purposive and snowball sampling method, and a semi-structure interview was used to collect data from the participants.

The study used Moustakas’s heuristic phenomenological approach, which allowed the use of thematic analysis to record and identify passages of the text that fell into categories.

The finding from the research puts the brain drain phenomenon on the Nigerian government and its lack of support in rebuilding the healthcare system. Recommendations were made based on the emergent themes on how the government can work with Nigerians in the diaspora to help strengthen the Nigerian healthcare sector and to create worthwhile policies/laws/regulations that will help build the country.

Implication for positive social change include the creation of jobs for young Nigerians and creating proper policies and wage scale so that they can be on par with their counterpart.

The international migration of skilled workers, the “brain drain,” is not a new phenomenon or limited to the health sector.

One of the first documented brain drains occurred during the Dark Ages, when emigrants from the Byzantine Empire played an important role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world and Renaissance Italy. In the 19th and 20th centuries there were notable emigrations to North America from Europe.

In modern times, brain drain occurs mostly from low-resource to high-resource nations and from rural to urban areas.

The brain drain of the health workforce is a global problem. Doctors from Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Pacific countries migrate to resource-rich countries, and it is estimated that more than 20% of physicians working in Australia, Canada, and USA come from other countries

Brain drain of health workers has a negative effect on the reproductive and sexual health of the people in the source country, especially those who rely on public medical services in rural areas.

Shortage and uneven distribution of healthcare workers, aggravated by the brain drain, has contributed to the high rate of maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity in the source countries compared with the recipient countries, causing the largest disparity of all public health measures.

Brain drain and the Millennium Development Goals

Improving maternal health, Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 5, is often referred to as the heart of the MDGs; progress here is critical to achieving the other MDGs.

If MDG 5 fails, the other MDGs will too. The policy and program changes required to achieve MDG 5 will directly support MDGs 3 to 7 women's empowerment, child health, HIV and other diseases, and the environment and indirectly determine the achievement of poverty reduction (MDG 1) and education (MDG 2) At least 2.3 trained

Causes and determinates of migration

The migration of healthcare workers is attributed to several factors, including unreasonably low wages paid to national health professionals; political instability and poor socioeconomic conditions; brutal regimes; internal and regional armed conflicts; wars; fractionalization and religious and ethnic drives (e.g. in Ethiopia, Sudan, Angola, Zaire, and Iraq); employment of health professionals in fields other than those of their expertise; low level of development and frustration of practicing

The changing face of the brain drain

“Brain gain” occurs when many trained and talented health workers seek entrance into a country, which creates a brain drain in the source country.

“Brain circulation” or “brain exchange” described the situation that occurred in Canada when many highly-skilled Canadian health workers moved to the United States, while simultaneously many qualified immigrants moved to Canada. Moreover, because this movement is global, it affects high-income as well as low-income countries.

New forms of

Economic and social implications of the brain drain

The cost of the outflow of health workers can be considerable. When low-income nations pay to educate their healthcare workers only to have them leave the county, they are, in effect, subsidizing a wealthier nation; this makes the rich nations richer and the poor nations poorer and is a curse for economic development. Low-resource nations spend US$ 500?million each year to educate health workers who leave to work in North America, Western Europe, and South Asia ,The unemployment rate

Health implications of the brain drain

When health professionals migrate to high-income countries the poor may be forced to seek medical treatment from traditional healers, while the wealthy may travel outside the country for their routine medical checkups; this aggravates the inequity in access to healthcare services in such countries.?

Nigeria only has 7.5 per cent of the needed medical doctors for its population.

To make matters worse, many of the remaining doctors in the country are planning to join their colleagues who have migrated abroad for job fulfilment and a better working environment.

That many of these medical doctors are products of our tuition-free public universities makes the case pathetic. For?context, Nigeria has trained 90,000 medical doctors as of May 2018, according to the immediate past Health Minister, Isaac Adewole. Of that total, 70 per cent have migrated to the United States, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and other nations they feel their services are better valued.?According to the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), some 50 doctors migrate from the country every week.?

To compound the situation, doctors are not the only health professionals seeking greener pastures abroad.

Nurses, medical laboratory practitioners, pharmacists and allied personnel are also leaving the country in droves.?For instance, 57,000 nurses have migrated from Nigeria within the last five years (2017 – 2022) according to the President of the National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives?

GLOBE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY