The Nigerian media is awash with a current report that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has accepted a coverage to retain medical consultants throughout the nation to supply residents with much-needed high quality healthcare. This coverage could also be a response to the perceived mass exodus of Nigerian medical doctors to different international locations, particularly Europe, America and Saudi Arabia, the place they anticipate to achieve job satisfaction and commensurate compensation for his or her providers.
This coverage reversal could also be a departure from earlier ones by which the federal authorities brazenly inspired medical consultants to hunt greener pastures outdoors the nation or in different fields of endeavour. On the peak of that coverage implementation, Prof Isaac Adewole, himself a professor of drugs and former Vice Chancellor of the College of Ibadan, as minister of Well being within the Muhammadu Buhari administration, had admonished Nigerian medical doctors to take to farming as an alternative in response to complaints about unemployment amongst them. Then, Nigerians have been justifiably scandalised.
Not but accomplished, the Minister of Labour and Productiveness additionally in that administration, Dr Chris Ngige, himself a medical physician, boasted that the nation had sufficient medical doctors and a few to spare for different international locations. That was not precisely the precise scenario within the well being sector. President Buhari’s Particular Adviser on Media and Publicity, Femi Adesina, lent his voice to these justifying the pattern. In his opinion, nothing was mistaken with it, as that transfer would expose the medical doctors to job satisfaction and experiences they might have in any other case not acquired whereas serving in Nigeria.
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In equity to those authorities officers, there may be nothing mistaken with educated medical personnel exploring alternatives in sectors aside from their discipline of examine. In any case, a one-time President of the World Financial institution, Jim Yong Kim, was an achieved medical physician. Within the Buhari administration, Okechukwu Enelamah was Minister of Business, Commerce and Funding. He was additionally a medical physician who veered off to coach within the discipline of enterprise. The purpose to be famous right here is that it have to be out of private selection and conviction and never pushed by circumstances that place no worth on drugs.
In our opinion, the assertions by authorities operatives referred to above beg the query of the actual cause why these medical doctors are abandoning their stethoscopes in Nigeria. The Secretary to the Authorities of the Federation (SGF) in that very same administration, Boss Mustapha, captured the explanation succinctly through the COVID-19 pandemic when he publicly lamented that he didn’t know that the nation’s healthcare supply system was so decrepit.
As with different sectors of the nation’s life, the well being sector appears deserted by the authorities, who pay little greater than scant consideration to the providers or lack of them offered in these hospitals. That is deliberate as a result of these policymakers are availed of medical providers overseas; they and their households are taken care of by the state in what’s pejoratively known as medical tourism, which has remained a drain on the nation’s overseas reserve. Ranging from underfunding, the sector exists solely in identify. Because of pervasive corruption, the little cash budgeted for well being providers is frittered away.
Within the course of, primary devices wanted for environment friendly service supply are insufficient, if not altogether non-existent. Consciously, medical providers have been ceded to the personal sector, the place the revenue motive drives service supply with the implication that the poor are intentionally out-maneuvered as the price is past their attain.
It’s commonplace to note that, in some circumstances, medical doctors in public amenities purchase the hand gloves they essentially have to placed on earlier than attending to sufferers. This important instrument needs to be taken without any consideration however isn’t even accessible. That can give one a transparent perception into what obtains in different areas of healthcare supply system. Compounding this dreary scenario, in our opinion, is the truth that medical doctors within the nation are overworked and grossly underpaid. The working situations in Nigerian hospitals make job provides from overseas seem very engaging and professionally fulfilling.
From this attitude, we posit that any coverage restraining medical doctors from looking for fulfilment elsewhere is unhelpful and repugnant to the provisions of labour legal guidelines within the nation and internationally, which assure free entry and free exit. Apart from medical doctors educated and bonded by the federal government, it’s improper and even unlawful to cease anybody, not simply medical doctors, from looking for skilled enhancement the place they’re accessible. It’s towards all recognized tenets of pure justice, fairness, and good conscience, to not point out the infringement of their basic rights as enshrined within the Structure.
As a substitute of setting up any such coverage, the federal government ought to take a tough have a look at the sector and determine areas that want enchancment by way of provision of infrastructure, capability constructing, remuneration and compensation.
Moreover, the federal government should finish the present observe of sending its officers overseas for medical remedy. The sources deployed in such wastages needs to be channelled in the direction of making the healthcare system conducive to Nigerians.
