Medical Negligence and Patient Safety in Nigeria: Examining the Causes, Consequences, and Pathways to Healthcare Accountability

Abstract

Hospitals meant to heal too often become sites of preventable harm, a paradox that lies at the heart of this paper on medical negligence and patient safety in Nigeria: examining the causes, consequences, and pathways to healthcare accountability. The paper was guided by four objectives, namely to examine the causes of medical negligence within Nigeria's public and private healthcare facilities, including workforce, infrastructural, and regulatory factors; to assess the consequences of medical negligence on patient safety, morbidity, mortality, and public confidence; to evaluate the legal, institutional, and professional obstacles hindering victims from obtaining redress; and to identify pathways toward strengthening healthcare accountability and patient safety enforcement. The paper adopted Reason's Organisational Accident Model as its theoretical framework, conceiving negligence as the product of aligned weaknesses across layered organisational defences rather than isolated individual failing, and employed a narrative, desk-based review methodology drawing on recent, verifiable scholarly sources. The paper findings revealed that workforce depletion, infrastructural deficiency, and weak regulatory enforcement jointly predispose Nigerian facilities to negligent outcomes, producing measurable morbidity, psychological distress among practitioners, and a cumulative erosion of public confidence, while evidentiary burdens, fragmented tribunal mandates, and a professional culture resistant to disclosure obstruct redress. The paper concluded that reform requires coordinated rather than piecemeal intervention and recommended mandatory facility inspection standards, non-punitive incident-reporting systems, and harmonised regulatory-legal redress mechanisms.