ABSTRACT
For decades, Nigerian public education, including health care education programs, was chronically underfunded. Undeterred by inadequate resources, the educational system hobbled along but currently marred by multiple challenges. The training of health care professionals changed significantly in the last decade (between 2010 and 2020), but the developments incurred several unintended events and problems. This chapter analyzes the significant unforeseen circumstances in Nigeria’s health care education, including the shortage of faculty in primary specialties due to mass migration to high-income countries in search of greener pastures, limited capacity in grant writing, underfunding of institutions/programs, and failure to enforce existing academic policies. Other untoward challenges are unethical misconduct in research, plagiarism, and falsification of credentials, incessant closure of universities due to student unrest and union strikes, gender inequity, poorly conceived academic policies, adversarial relationship between the College of Health Sciences and the University Teaching Hospitals, campus brigandage, sexual harassment. It will be an arduous task to effectively solve the ongoing challenges in health care education because of the endemic corruption, tribalism, and nepotism practices that have permeated the fabric of the Nigerian society.
