Health
Nigeria has less than two nurses per one thousand patients – NANNM
The Chairman of National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives, University of Benin Teaching Hospital, chapter, Mr. Osigbeme Augustine, on Tuesday, lamented that Nigeria has less than two nurses per a thousand patients.
Speaking at a rally to mark the international world nursing year in Benin, Osigbeme said Nigeria should make deliberate efforts at increasing the number of nurses in Nigeria through training, retraining and proper remuneration.
Osigbeme urged the federal government to design a good rewarding system as a way of curbing the brain-drain in the nursing profession in Nigeria.
Osigbeme said, “Honestly, Nigeria has nurses but they keep leaving this country, in all hospitals in Nigeria we keep losing nurses because they travel abroad in search of greener pastures and I don’t blame them because they need to meet their family financial obligations so government needs to stop this brain drain by providing a good rewarding system.
“In Nigeria today, there is acute shortage of nurses, the fact is that in critical setting of nursing you need one nurse per four patients but in other settings like normal wards you need one nurse to seven patients now when you have three nurses to thirty patients it falls below expectations so what United Nations have in mind is to encourage the government of the world to pay great attention to nursing as a profession so that we can build that critical part of the health sector that is the major backbone of the health industry.”
“We count the population of the world in billions today but we have just 29.9 million nurses world-wide and that means every nation that is a member of world Health Organization have about three nurses to a thousand patients.
“In Nigeria for instance we have about 1.5 nurse to a thousand patients in other words we have less than two nurses per a thousand patients in Nigeria so you can see that we have so small number of nurses when compared to the number of people in the nation.
“There are lots of health challenges and you need the nurse to tackle the challenges because the nurse is the major backbone of the health industry. We need over nine million nurses in the world to meet up the patient need so the United Nations wants the world to put premium attention on the training, retraining and capacity development of nurses that is why we are out for this rally,” he said.
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