History

The College of Health Sciences of the University of Ilorin was incepted as a medical school in 1977 and over the years has been fulfilling its mandate of training medical doctors and other allied health professionals for the country. Faculty members are involved in preparing candidates for the Membership and Fellowship Examinations of the Nigerian and West African Postgraduate Medical Colleges, in various disciplines.  The College in addition runs postgraduate programmes in Anatomy, Physiology, Medical Microbiology and Parasitology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics, Paediatrics and Child health, Public Health and Community Health.

Faculty members of the College undertake basic and applied research and publish regularly in peer-reviewed journals. The conduct of research has however been fragmented and much of it has depended on either promotion driven self-sponsorship or collaborations with external counterparts. Whereas the College had played key pioneering roles in the eradication of dracunculiasis and control of onchocerciasis   (amongst others) in Nigeria, the College could do a lot more, through concerted efforts, in research if it could harness and harmonize the various efforts in a multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary manner. The COBES programme and the affiliation of the College as a WHO Collaborating Center for Research and Manpower development and the internalisation of the University, provide exceptional opportunity for and basis for the establishment of an Institute of Medical Research.

It is in light of this that the College is proposing to establish an Institute Medical Research and training with a view to reinvigorating its research drive. 

STATE OF MEDICAL RESEARCH IN NIGERIA

Over the years, Medical Faculties in the Country have conducted several clinical and basic sciences research in an effort to find solutions to health challenges affecting Nigerians. They have therefore actively contributed to knowledge in the ever increasing field of Medical Science. However, as it is with many other developmental issues in Nigeria, there has been an increasing gap between research outputs from Nigeria and the developed nations of the world. For instance a search of the PubMed online database using the country names as keyword for publications within the last 5-years as at January 2021 revealed the following number of publications; Ghana-8,331, Kenya-11,747, Nigeria-18,533, Egypt-43,443, and South Africa-51,311. In the same search the United Kingdom returned a figure of 239,222 and America, 325,723 publications. Furthermore, when medical journals published in Nigeria were subjected to the “rule of evidence” which is designed to grade clinical and research findings according to strength, about 45% of the publications assessed from local journals were classified as non-evidence over a two year period 2005-2006[1]. There was no publication classified as having level I evidence among the Nigerian journals assessed, while only 11% of the published articles were rated to have level II to III evidence. Some of the key factors responsible for the low quality of evidence in many Nigerian medical literature and medical publications in the country include poor research facilities, inadequate funding and low capacity for the conduct of studies using some contemporary tools.