Private Hospitals Bleed as Doctors Flee Nigeria

In this compelling analysis, CLEMENT ASIMATA exposes how Nigeria's worsening brain drain is crippling private hospitals, once considered havens amid failing public healthcare. As top medical talent emigrates in droves, private clinics now grapple with severe staffing shortages, burnout, and declining service quality-leaving millions of Nigerians at risk. The story captures the full extent of the crisis, from overstretched doctors to silent operating theatres, and warns of a looming collapse unless urgent action is taken.

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Nigeria's private hospitals, once considered bastions of medical excellence amid the decline of public healthcare, are now buckling under the weight of the country's accelerating medical brain drain.

For years, Nigerians turned to these private institutions in search of timely, effective treatment. Today, these same facilities are overwhelmed, chronically short-staffed, and increasingly unable to deliver the quality of care they once promised.

Across the country, patients now face prolonged waiting times and rescheduled appointments—not due to system glitches or temporary outages, but because the doctors are no longer there. In Lekki, Lagos, a man seeking cardiological evaluation was told to return in two weeks. The hospital had just one consultant left, now stretched across two branches. In Gbagada, a woman's nephew who required an emergency appendectomy was asked to wait 48 hours. The hospital's only available surgeon had just completed a 36-hour shift and was medically unfit to proceed.

What was once seen as a government sector problem has now spilled fully into the private domain.

Doctors are exiting the country at alarming rates, lured by better working conditions, more reliable infrastructure, and substantially higher pay abroad. In many private clinics across Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt, medical directors struggle daily to cobble together skeletal staff just to keep operations going. Paediatricians, anaesthetists, cardiologists, and even general practitioners are disappearing from rosters, their names replaced by "vacant" in shift schedules.