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The Chief Medical Director of the Federal Medical Centre, Ebute-Metta, Lagos, Dr. Adedamola Dada, shares his thoughts with Sodiq Ojuroungbe on brain drain affecting the health sector and measures being taken by the hospital to retain health workers.
"For us, we are expanding our services. And you can go around to see that we are expanding our services. One of the solutions that we have found is that in this city of Lagos, we have a lot of people who have the required skills, who are still strong, and who are retired: retired specialist consultants, retired nurses, and all the rest of them. So what we have done is actively encourage these retired people out of retirement.
And then the second thing, as I said, is to create an enabling environment—a good environment—so that even those who are staying will prefer to stay with us. And that is what has been happening.
People are resigning. Some people are resigning. But I can tell you categorically that the impact has not been too severe for us. That is not because people are not resigning, but because we have been able to design programs and alternatives to ensure that we are in a position to replace some of these people who are resigning.
We’ve called back quite a number of them. If you are talking in terms of specialists alone, almost half of the specialists in my anesthesia department are retired, and they are still strong, and they are still working.
But you find out that in many other places, they have probably reduced the number of surgeries they are doing. But our number, the number of surgeries we are doing, has not reduced. It has gone up. That is because we have been able to attract these specialists and experts who are still strong, who have retired, to come back into practice, provide an enabling environment for them, and understand their need and their capacity."
