Nigeria’s health crisis deepens as one doctor serves 9,083 patients
Resident doctors raise alarm over burnout and unsafe work hours that put both patients and medics at risk.
The Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) has sounded an alarm that cuts to the heart of the nation’s healthcare crisis: one doctor is now responsible for an average of 9,083 Nigerians.
For many, this is not just a number; it is a death sentence waiting to happen. Only weeks ago, the country mourned a young doctor who collapsed and died after enduring multiple days of relentless call duty. His story is not an isolated tragedy; it is the grim reality of an overstretched system where saving lives often costs doctors their own.
According to NARD, resident doctors, who make up the backbone of Nigeria’s hospitals, are routinely forced to work 106.5 hours per week, with surgical residents enduring as many as 122.7 hours. “This is not sustainable,” NARD President, Dr Mohammad Suleiman, said in the association’s statement. “It inevitably leads to increased medical errors, patient deaths, and preventable loss of doctors’ lives.”
The crisis has been worsened by a wave of “Japa”, the mass migration of Nigerians abroad in search of better pay and working conditions. Health Minister Prof. Muhammad Pate recently revealed that more than 16,000 doctors have left Nigeria in just the last seven years, leaving barely 11,000 resident doctors behind to serve over 240 million people.
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This dire shortage has left hospitals dangerously under-resourced. In some federal teaching hospitals, wards are overcrowded with patients while only a handful of healthcare practitioners are available to manage emergencies, outpatient clinics, and critical surgeries simultaneously. Patients wait hours, sometimes days, for life-saving care, while the doctors attending to them struggle to stay awake after marathon shifts.
The consequences are brutal: exhausted healthcare practitioners making life-or-death decisions under impossible conditions, patients waiting endlessly for care, and young professionals burning out before their careers can even begin. “Too often, resident doctors sacrifice their health, and sometimes their lives, in service to their patients,” NARD said. “But who cares for their families after their passing? How many more lives must we lose before decisive action is taken?”
As part of its new directive, NARD announced that effective October 1, 2025, resident doctors across the country will no longer take continuous calls beyond 24 hours. “There must be a call-free period after every call,” the association insisted, describing the decision as an act of “self-preservation” in line with the Hippocratic Oath.
The group also urged the Federal Ministry of Health to introduce a one-to-one replacement policy for them, so that every resignation or migration is immediately backfilled. Without such measures, they warned, the few doctors still holding Nigeria’s fragile healthcare system together will continue to collapse under the weight.
Experts argue that beyond recruitment, Nigeria must invest in retention, fair remuneration, and better working conditions. Without urgent reforms, the cycle of brain drain, burnout, and preventable deaths will only accelerate.
“They are patriots and heroes,” NARD said of its members. “But even heroes cannot survive in a system designed to break them.”
