Over the past few years, there have been many anecdotal reports about the challenges that doctors and by extension, other health workers face working in Nigeria. Most Nigerians are familiar with the lack of equipment, the heavy workload, the absence of opportunities for development and poor infrastructure that can be seen in the health sector.

From spending 7 years in medical school, often extended by the disruptive frequent strikes that we have decried in previous posts to the difficulty in finding places to complete the compulsory one year housemanship programme within two years of graduation, the lot of the new Nigerian doctor is not an easy one.

Then after NYSC, the compulsory one year of national service mandated for every Nigerian graduate, there is the challenge of finding a job, often driven by the paradox that jobs for doctors, in a country that has not met the recommended WHO density of doctors, nurses and midwives can be hard to find. Part of this is probably because of the concentration of health workers in urban areas, but whatever the explanation, the effect is that we often have unemployed doctors looking for work. Even setting up on your own clinic is a challenge because of the cost of equipment, rent and other expenses, unless you choose to cut corners, which some do.

For many doctors, the pinnacle of their career is completing a specialist training programme or residency, to qualify as a specialist. Getting into one of these programmes is again another mountain for the contemporary Nigerian doctor to climb. There is the cost of the qualifying primary examinations and study materials to grapple with, as well as the high failure rate in these examinations.

Are you a doctor, nurse, midwife, lab scientist or other health personnel working in Nigeria? We would love to hear your story of both the challenges and the rewards of working in the Nigerian health sector. Comment here: http://nigeriahealthwatch.com/being-a-doctor-in-nigeria-challenges-and-opportunities-for-change/

Let us begin a conversation that will hopefully give birth to solutions for our health sector.

If only our graduate doctors are qualified and we got platforms as vezeeta.com and Zocdoc in the US this won't be the story.