Medical Education in Nigeria: Training in Humanistic Qualities

Abstract

Since the 1980's, there has been a prolific growth of medical schools and teaching hospitals in Nigeria. Along with this growth and progress, there have been incessant strikes by health care workers protesting poor remunerations and lack of necessary infrastructures and drugs. This has greatly affected the quality of our medical graduates and the health care services offered in hospitals across the country. Being a patient in a hospital has a potential for being more frightening, lonelier, more confusing and in many ways, more dehumanizing than ever before.


The challenge to the medical education today is not only the acquisition of knowledge and skills required for prescribed professional roles but also the training of humane doctors. The doctors have to alleviate the patients' suffering by providing emotional, social, spiritual and physical support in a holistic care setting. The Doctors can clearly convey caring and support for patients and their families in a meaningful, genuine and sincere way by treating them as human persons primarily who does not loose their humanness by being ill.


Key Words: Medical education, illness, human person, humanistic training


Orient Journal of Medicine Vol.15(1&2) 2003: 13-17