Nurses working in government-owned hospitals across the country are groaning over poor remuneration, staff shortages, unpaid allowances, and unsafe working conditions amid brain drain in the health sector. PUNCH Healthwise investigation reveals how these frontline health workers battle exhaustion and collapse on duty caring for others. IDOWU ABDULLAHI reports

Under the dim fluorescent lights of the Accident and Emergency unit, where every second counts at a federal teaching hospital in South-West, IV bags dangling from metal stands, and nurses in scrubs move briskly between patients, when the unexpected happens..

One of the triage nurses on duty, simply identified as Nurse Adeyinka, suddenly collapsed midway into her 8-hour shift, becoming a patient herself. It was not the first time the 34-year-old had worked through fatigue, hunger, and aching legs. But that morning in May 2025, her body finally gave out.

When colleagues rushed to her aid, her blood pressure had dipped dangerously, and her blood sugar levels were low. She had not eaten in over 16 hours, and the hospital was critically short-staffed.

The night before, she had gotten home late due to working overtime, and her appetite had been battered after several missed meals due to the high patient load.
She retired early to her bed and returned for her shift duty before 8:00 a.m. the day she collapsed, forgetting to eat.

“She just slumped by the patient’s bed while checking vitals. We had to put her on a drip and monitor her right there in the Accident and Emergency ward. It was scary.

“Despite being one of our own, we couldn’t stay with her more than five minutes, as there are a lot of other patients that need our attention. As nurses, we’ve taken an oath to care for the sick. So even when we’re sick or one of us is sick, work still has to continue,” a colleague who witnessed the incident told PUNCH Healthwise.

Escaped death by a whisker
It was just past 3:00 a.m. when Lucky, a registered nurse at a general hospital in Ondo, collapsed beside the stretcher he had been tending to all night.

For days, he had been battling malaria and diarrhoea, but had refused to call in sick since there was no one else to take his shift. The hospital, already short-staffed, was running on skeletal strength.

With more than usual patients that night in June 2025, Lucky was moving from bed to bed, pale and visibly weak, attending to patients when he collapsed to the cold tile floor, unconscious.

Panic rent the air as patients’ relatives screamed. But there was no doctor on duty, only a young health assistant, overwhelmed and untrained for such emergencies.

“I collapsed on duty about two months ago. It was in the middle of the night. I was having malaria and diarrhoea at the same time.

“There was no doctor on the ground. I was the only health worker available at that time,” Lucky told our correspondent.

It took over an hour before a medical team from a hospital in a neighboring local government arrived. By then, the registered nurse was severely dehydrated and barely responsive, left with just hope that he wouldn’t die on duty.

“We had to call another team from a different local government area to come and rescue me. I had to be admitted.

“I was rolling on the floor from pain. And yet, there were still patients waiting to be attended to. That’s the reality. That’s what nurses are facing across this country,” he said.

For Adeyinka and Lucky, their stories remain a reflection of the new normal that nurses across Nigeria face working in understaffed facilities, grueling work hours, and underpaid wages.

Their reality, our correspondent gathered, had turned nursing, once considered a noble calling for many in Nigeria, into a profession of endless sacrifice with little reward.

As thousands of nurses leave the country for better opportunities abroad, PUNCH Healthwise gathered that those left behind are stretched beyond capacity, risking their physical and mental health to uphold the crumbling system.

Brain drain is draining available nurses
Available figures from 2023 showed that the country’s healthcare system is losing skilled professionals at an alarming rate. According to data from the Nigerian Nursing and Midwifery Council, over 75,000 Nigerian-trained nurses and midwives are reportedly working abroad.

“As a result of poor wages and lack of decent work environments, over 75,000 Nurses and Midwives have migrated from Nigeria within a period of five years.

“Shortage of Nurses and midwives, especially in certain areas of specialisation and geographic regions, the increased rates of attrition and a chronic shortage of nursing personnel in the country increased workloads on nurses without an equivalent compensation, exposing them to more health hazards and compromising the quality of healthcare delivery,” the then NANNMC President, Michael Nnachi, said during the 2023 International Nurses Week.

Also, the 2021 State of the World’s Midwifery report puts the midwives shortage in Nigeria at about 30,000, which is six per 10,000 people.