By Joyce Anaba, JKNewsMedia Intern
LIMITED HOUSEMANSHIP placements are leaving about 2,000 medical graduates without access to mandatory training each year, the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) has disclosed.
JKNewsMedia.com reports that the council’s Registrar, Fatimah Kyari, said the Centralised Housemanship System operating in the country can accommodate only 4,000 doctors against the roughly 6,000 medical graduates produced annually.
Housemanship is the compulsory one-year postgraduate internship for medical graduates. It provides supervised clinical training in accredited hospitals before full licensure.
With this, newly qualified doctors, known as house officers, rotate through medicine, surgery, paediatrics and obstetrics to build practical skills in patient care, diagnosis and management under senior supervision.
Kyari spoke on Friday when she appeared before the Senate Committee on Health chaired by Senator Banigo Ipaliboto to defend the MDCN’s 2026 budget proposals.
She urged the inclusion of state and privately owned hospitals in the training system to absorb all graduates.
“A total of about 6,000 medical doctors are produced annually from the various medical schools while the Centralised Housemanship System in operation has capacity for 4, 000 medical doctors,” she said.
She also adds: “As a way of accommodating the 6,000 at once yearly, there is a need to include state- and privately-owned hospitals in the Centralised Housemanship System.”
Kyari said expanding access would enable all trainees to enroll at once and help tackle the brain drain syndrome, known as japa, in Nigeria.
She also listed funding challenges affecting the council’s work. Though N1.2bn was appropriated as capital vote in 2025, she told the committee that nothing was released to the MDCN.
For overhead, only N35.7m was released out of N100m, while N13.8bn was released from the N16.8bn budgeted for personnel costs.
Senator Ipaliboto assured her that the situation would change in 2026, saying the committee would make appropriate recommendations to the Senate to address the challenges she outlined.
