Not many individuals might have heard of Miriam Olusanya. However Ms. Olusanya is at the moment Managing Director of GT Financial institution, an organization with a market capitalisation in extra of a trillion Naira and nicely over three thousand everlasting staff.GT Financial institution generated a revenue barely in extra of a trillion Naira within the first half of 2024.
Ms. Olusanya initially skilled as a pharmacist. Had been she to have pursued a profession in pharmacy and chosen to work in a hospital, she would by no means have been privileged to guide any public hospital in any way. Certainly, she would by no means have risen above the position of Director of Pharmaceutical Providers, which is the place pharmacists are usually capped within the hospital surroundings.
That is the paradox of Nigeria’s well being establishments: Chief Medical Administrators, as managing administrators of hospitals are identified, have to be medical docs, in accordance with a decree that was engineered by Prof. Ransome-Kuti, well being minister within the Babangida years. Though it’s irrational and unlawful, being discriminatory in opposition to different well being practitioners, that decree has since grow to be entrenched in our statute books.
Managing an enterprise, because the world has lengthy come to understand, shouldn’t be essentially a operate {of professional} coaching. You don’t essentially have to have skilled as a banker to run a financial institution efficiently, as Olusanya and lots of others have confirmed. Nor do it’s essential to be a skilled doctor to efficiently run a hospital. The truth is, in the US, lower than 5 per cent of hospitals are led by medical docs.
Managing a thriving hospital because the U.S. has lengthy realised, is a operate of how skillfully a frontrunner synergistically aligns all of the essential parts comparable to planning, organising, staffing, controlling and main.
Whereas a medical physician might certainly possess all of those qualities along with his abilities as a doctor, these traits will not be unique to medical docs and may additionally dwell within the sundry different professionals who present service within the hospital surroundings: pharmacists, nurses, medical laboratory scientists, accountants, physiotherapists, psychologists, well being economists, directors, and lots of extra.
Sadly, docs, aided by Ransome-Kuti’s decree have continued to feed Nigerians with the unsuitable impression that solely docs can run hospitals. Within the course of, the dragnet for the choice of Chief Medical Administrators of hospitals in Nigeria, is intentionally constricted, being restricted to docs. These essential public establishments are due to this fact denied the potential management that will have been offered by hordes of proficient professionals in disciplines apart from medication.
The state of affairs shouldn’t be completely different in Nigeria’s medical or well being universities. Whereas Nigeria’s first specialised college is the Tai Solarin College of Schooling in Ijebu-Ode, medical universities have over time, regularly sprung up throughout the nation.
These universities practice docs and as well as, pharmacists, nurses and different medical specialties. They’re staffed by medical docs in addition to academics from different disciplines together with the medical sciences. It doesn’t take rocket science to know that medical or well being universities will not be basically completely different from different universities. They’re solely completely different in that they’re restricted to instructing programs within the medical and well being fields. Managing these universities, due to this fact isn’t any completely different from managing another college in Nigeria.
Curiously, nonetheless, solely medical docs can aspire to grow to be Vice Chancellors of Nigeria’s medical and well being universities as any advert for that place will verify. The present VC of Lagos State College is a physiologist – Physiology is likely one of the medical sciences. Had been the School of Medical Sciences of Lagos State College to be upgraded to a full-fledged medical college right this moment, LASU’s VC wouldn’t qualify to be its VC.
Just a few months in the past, the Nnamdi Azikiwe College, Awka threw up a case that presents an ideal alternative for medical docs to carry a mirror to themselves for a radical examination. In search of a brand new VC to switch the outgone one whose tenure had expired, the college marketed the vacant VC place. Any aspiring VC it stipulated, consistent with a key requirement by the Nationwide Universities Fee, should possess a PhD.
Hell was let free as the identical docs who’ve for many years been beneficiaries of the discriminatory Ransome-Kuti decree which makes the CMD place unique to them, who’ve been discriminatory of different professions with regard to VCship of medical universities, cried blue homicide. The college, they complained, was being “discriminatory” in opposition to medical docs. Of their reckoning which they presume is superior to the NUC’s prescription, the scientific coaching which a medical physician undergoes within the quest to grow to be a specialist or advisor, is “equal to a PhD.”
Apparently, fairly various medical docs possess each the scientific {qualifications} in addition to PhDs which means that the PhD shouldn’t be fairly the superfluous diploma they might need the world to consider.
The medical consultants went additional. In typical vogue, they went on strike. They deserted the sick and dying to their destiny, with a purpose to justify a declare that’s at finest questionable, and at worst an try to deceive the general public.
Which brings us to the query: Why do Nigerian docs go on strike on the drop of a hat? Medical consultants are the highest docs in Nigeria – essentially the most skilled and maybe essentially the most expert. In downing instruments over an unproven assertion that claims parity between scientific fellowships and PhDs, abandoning the identical sick and dying sufferers whom they swore to guard and save, what method of instance do they depart their youthful colleagues?
College School Hospital, UCH, Ibadan has been within the information for all method of causes these days. The hospital has defaulted serially in paying its power payments and its present circumstances are deplorable. Might management be its drawback? Is it not believable that opening the CMD place to sundry professions and in so doing broadening the pool from which the most effective leaders may be chosen, might assist redress the hospital’s pathetic state of affairs?
The present system that imposes the physician because the obligatory head of all well being establishments, together with medical universities, is anachronistic and has no place within the current day the place all of the well being professionals are equally well-educated. Nigeria must jettison this historic observe and permit the nation profit from the worth doubtlessly derivable from choosing leaders of Nigeria’s healthcare establishments from a various pool of pros. This may even assist to significantly curtail the disharmony that exists within the well being sector.
It’s unlucky, nonetheless, that different well being professionals have over time tended to just accept with equanimity, a state of affairs the place they’re perpetually subjugated in hospital settings and now, in medical college settings. Why have they been unable to problem prevailing legal guidelines that are discriminatory even when Nigeria’s structure explicitly states that residents should not be discriminated in opposition to, underneath any guise? They should borrow a leaf from the pragmatism of their physician colleagues who sometimes waste no time in agitating vehemently, every time they think about they’re oppressed.
George Bernard Shaw was spot on when he asserted that each career is a conspiracy in opposition to the laity. Apparently, no career wherever on the planet typifies this assertion higher than Nigeria’s medical docs whose conspiracy of deceit has typically left Nigeria with the quick finish of the stick.
Do medical docs play an extremely important position in our lives? With out query. That position, nonetheless, ought to embody honesty, honour, humility and accountability. Medical doctors have to mood their sense of self-importance with a recognition of the sanctity of the lofty oaths they’ve taken to save lots of lives.
Governments alternatively, should additionally be taught to not grow to be slaves to the calls for of docs, nonetheless irrational. And different well being professionals should eschew complacency and combat for his or her rightful place in Nigeria’s healthcare settings, at the moment monopolised by their physician colleagues.
Okoruwa, a fellow of the Nigeria Academy of Pharmacy, is Chief Govt Officer of the communications consultancy, XLR8
