Every Federal Medical Centre & Teaching Hospital in Nigeria

Veligraph data desk · published 19 August 2026 · 179 tertiary facilities on record

At the top of Nigeria's health system sit its tertiary hospitals: the teaching hospitals and federal medical centres meant to handle the cases nothing below them can. Veligraph tracks 179 of them across the country. They are also the hospitals under the most strain, and the ones whose gaps send patients abroad.

Why the tertiary tier matters

Federal Medical Centres and university teaching hospitals are the apex of a referral pyramid that runs down through general hospitals to thousands of primary centres. They concentrate the specialists, the operating theatres and the advanced diagnostics that exist almost nowhere else in the system. That concentration is exactly the problem: when these hospitals fall short, patients who can afford it leave the country. Nigerians spend an estimated 1 billion dollars or more every year on medical treatment abroad, much of it for oncology, cardiac and complex surgical care that the tertiary tier is meant to provide at home (widely reported figures range from roughly 1 to 1.6 billion dollars annually).

The same hospitals are losing the people who run them. By 2023 more than 12,000 Nigerian-trained doctors were registered in the United Kingdom alone, with the United States, Canada and Germany close behind, part of a workforce exodus that hits teaching hospitals and their consultant ranks hardest. A directory of these facilities is, in part, a map of where that pressure lands.

Federal Medical Centres (12)

The federal government's flagship general-referral hospitals, at least one in most states.

Teaching hospitals (36)

University teaching hospitals, combining tertiary care with the training of Nigeria's next generation of doctors.

Each links to its full Veligraph record: beds, workforce by cadre, services and licence status. See the national dashboard for the full referral structure, or the best-equipped hospitals in Nigeria ranked by capacity.

Facility records are from Nigeria's national health facility register (2026). Figures on medical tourism and the medical workforce are drawn from widely reported estimates and UK General Medical Council registration data.

Sources

• Nigeria Health Facility Registry, Federal Ministry of Health, tertiary facility records (2026)
• UK General Medical Council register statistics, Nigerian-trained doctors registered in the UK
• WHO Global Health Observatory, health workforce benchmarks

Register figures are shown as recorded; anomalies are flagged, not edited. Method and limitations: how Veligraph is built.