Healthcare in Nigeria

Healthcare in Nigeria is a concurrent responsibility of the three tiers of government in the country.^[1] Private providers of healthcare have a visible role to play in healthcare delivery. The use of traditional medicine (TM) and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has increased significantly over the past few years.^[2]

Healthcare delivery in Nigeria has experienced progressive deterioration as a result of under-investment by successive governments, to effectively solve several problems that have existed in the sector over many years. This directly impacts the productivity of citizens and Nigeria's economic growth by extension. As of February 2018, the country was ranked 187 out of 191 countries in the world, in assessing the level of compliance with Universal Health Coverage (UHC), as very little of the populace is health insured, whereas even government budget for health services is insignificant. Out-of-pocket payments for health causes households to incur huge expenditures. Private expenditure on health as a percentage of total health expenditure is 74.85%.

The implication of this is that government expenditure for health is only 25.15 percent of all the money spent on health across the nation. Of the percentage spent on health by the citizens (74.85%), about 70% is spent as out-of-pocket expenditure to pay for access to health services in both government and private facilities. Most of the remaining money spent by citizens on their health is spent on procuring 'alternatives'. Nigerian-trained medical personnel are some of the best medical practitioners in the world. But low wages and poor workplace culture have forced hundreds of thousands of them to flee to Europe and America. ^[3]However, considering its size and population, there are fewer health workers per unit population than are required to provide effective health services to the entire nation. The most common reason is the brain drain of health professionals in other countries, especially in Europe and America.^[4]