The Nigerian Implementation Science Alliance (NISA) has stressed the need to overhaul the way health professionals and researchers are trained in the country by creating stronger links between universities, government health programmes and employers in order to address the disconnect between academic training and practical experience in the health sector.
It emphasized that implementation science is a critical tool for addressing challenges in Nigeria’s health sector .

Chair of NISA Trustee Board, Prof. Echezona Ezeanolue who made the call at the 11th annual NISA Scientific Conference in Abuja, lamented that many highly trained Nigerians leave the country for better opportunities and called for deliberate effort to create a system capable of producing professionals whom Nigerian institutions would want to employ.

The NISA Board Chair said Nigeria could no longer afford to train professionals without considering whether their skills matched the demands of the health sector adding that NISA is considering a new approach that will involve bringing international expertise into Nigeria to strengthen local capacity and ensure that training is relevant to the country’s needs.

“We want to build a solid foundation here in Nigeria,” the chair said, noting that although some Nigerians sent abroad for training return home, others do not.

Ezeanolue explained that the programme is expected to involve universities, government institutions, national health programmes and implementing partners  in designing training that prepares professionals for both current and future challenges and ensuring that Nigerians trained in specialised health fields acquire practical skills that meet the needs of the country’s health system, while also helping to address the growing loss of highly trained professionals to opportunities abroad.
“We want to ask organisations in Nigeria: What do you need? What kind of people are you looking for? How can we design that training that trains for today and prepares for tomorrow?” the chair said.

Ezeanolue cited the training of PhD students as an example, explaining that students could spend progressively longer periods working directly with national health programmes during their studies.

He stated that under the proposed model, a student could spend time with a programme during the first year of a PhD, return for about 12 weeks in the second year and spend up to six months with the programme in the final year.
“By the time the student graduates, the health programme would already have had an opportunity to assess the individual’s skills and potentially employ them”.

Ezeanolue said such collaboration would help eliminate the problem of universities producing graduates whose skills do not correspond with the needs of employers, while also ensuring that health programmes benefit from scientific expertise.
He said,”We are connecting these two. We are not doing anything new. What we are doing here is different — connecting them so that they’re not working in silos,” .

Ezeanolue emphasized the need to  strengthen collaboration between academic institutions and practitioners to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and real-world health practice.

The chair said the approach was particularly important in specialised fields, citing the difficulty of finding qualified biostatisticians with the practical skills required by health programmes.

“The initiative, therefore, is expected to focus not only on producing more graduates but on producing professionals with skills that are immediately useful to the health system.

The approach also aligns with the broader theme of the conference, which focuses on ensuring that activities in the health sector translate into measurable and sustainable improvements in human health”.

Using maternal and child health as an example,  Ezeanolue noted that improving outcomes should begin before a child is born, through quality antenatal care, immunisation and other interventions that support a healthy pregnancy and early childhood.

He argued that emphasis should therefore shift from simply implementing programmes to examining whether those programmes are producing meaningful and sustainable results.

Also speaking, Chairman of the Conference and the Executive Director of Knowledge Network for Disease Control and Prevention (KNCV),  Dr Bernard Odume urged Nigerian researchers and health experts to move beyond producing scientific evidence and ensure that research findings translate into policies, effective programmes and better health outcomes for Nigerians.

He observed that generating evidence was no longer sufficient, arguing that the real challenge was ensuring that research findings translated into policies, programmes and practices capable of producing measurable and lasting improvements.

“Evidence must not end with publication. It must inform decisions about programme design, resource allocation, integration, financing and scale-up,” Odume said.

Odume pointed out that NISA had an important role to play in building a community of scientists, policymakers, implementers and practitioners capable of generating the evidence needed to guide Nigeria’s evolving health sector.
 He described implementation science as a critical tool for addressing challenges in Nigeria’s health sector adding that the future of implementation science in Nigeria would depend largely on developing a new generation of professionals capable of bridging the gap between scientific knowledge and real-world healthcare delivery.

According to him, implementation science is particularly important as Nigeria moves towards greater integration of health programmes, stronger country ownership and more sustainable financing.

Odume warned against conducting research merely for academic purposes, insisting that evidence must ultimately contribute to solving problems within the health system.

He explained that many policies and guidelines currently used in healthcare are products of lessons learned during programme implementation.

International guidelines, he added, may provide a starting point, but they cannot simply be transplanted into Nigeria without testing whether they work in local contexts.

“They need to be adapted to the local context, and we need to provide a platform on which some of these things are tested and adapted,” he said.

The approach, he argued, would enable Nigeria to make better use of limited resources while achieving greater health impact.

He explained that implementation science could help policymakers and programme managers understand what works, for whom, under what conditions, at what cost and how effective interventions could be institutionalised and sustained at scale.

The conference chair noted that this was particularly important as Nigeria pursued greater integration of disease-specific programmes into broader health services, increased country ownership and sustainable domestic financing of healthcare programmes.
According to him, the transition requires a closer relationship between research, policy and programme implementation, with the realities faced by healthcare workers and communities feeding continuously into research and policy decisions.

He said implementation science would become increasingly important as Nigeria strengthened its health systems at both national and subnational levels.

“The journey from evidence to impact requires more than identifying interventions that work. It requires understanding how evidence can be translated into policies and programmes, how interventions can be adapted to different contexts, how they can be integrated into existing systems, and how gains can be sustained over time,” he said.

Odume urged young researchers and emerging implementation scientists to take advantage of the platform to develop collaborations and acquire the skills required to operate at the intersection of research, policy and programme delivery.

He called for renewed commitment to ensuring that research evidence produces tangible results for Nigerians, stressing that objective should be to translate evidence into better policies, stronger and sustainably financed programmes, more resilient health systems and measurable improvements in the health and wellbeing of Nigerians.

On his part, the Director of Programme at the US National Cancer Institute, Randiak Alaro called for a stronger relationship between universities and industry to ensure that Africa’s educational institutions produce graduates capable of meeting real-world challenges.

He however, warned against universities becoming mere training centres for the immediate needs of industry.

Alaro stated that universities  must continue to develop critical thinkers capable of opening new frontiers, while industry must also play its part in ensuring that graduates can transition effectively into the workplace.
He recalled that after completing his PhD, the US National Institutes of Health invested almost six years in further developing his skills for the work he was expected to perform adding that similar partnerships could help bridge the gap between academic training and workplace requirements in Africa.

Alaro noted that implementation science itself could become too academic and disconnected from the realities confronting health workers, communities and policymakers.

He argued that science may tell policymakers what is needed to solve a problem while implementation science can show how to introduce that solution but the ultimate test is whether the solution is actually adopted, used and sustained.
 Alaro illustrated the difficulty of translating scientific knowledge into practice and emphasized the need to ensure that implementation science is embedded directly into programme delivery, so that health interventions are continuously tested, adapted and improved in real-world settings.

Alaro cited cervical cancer prevention as an example, questioning the value of simply handing a ministry a guideline developed years earlier and expecting it to work without considering current realities.

“Evidence must influence programme design, government decisions, resource allocation, financing, integration and scale-up. At the same time, the experiences of healthcare workers, programme implementers and communities must feed back into research and policymaking”.

The conference, themed “From Evidence to Impact: Advancing Implementation Science for Sustainable Development,” brought together researchers, policymakers, healthcare professionals, programme implementers, development partners, community representatives and other stakeholders to examine how evidence can be translated into effective and sustainable health interventions.