The Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, yesterday, reacted to the new policy of the Federal Government banning medical doctors in public health institutions from engaging in private practice during working hours, describing it as illegal. The association also asked the Federal Government to define what it meant by “working hours.
According to NMA, doctors in public hospitals are already working more that the period required by law. NMA’s National President, Professor Mike Ogirima, a professor of Orthopaedics and Trauma Surgery, stated this in Ilorin at a briefing to mark the 2017 Physicians’ Week.
He said: “The attempt to stop private practice by doctors working in public health institution is against the law of the land. NMA frowns on our members, who use the working hours to attend to their private clinics/hospitals. “Government should enforce the law by reconstituting the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria, MDCN. Government must not dissolve the MDCN without immediate reconstruction; we want it in perpetuity.
“NMA will work in tandem with government to discipline erring members, subjecting them to MDCN’s disciplinary tribunal, which has since being in limbo because of lack of MDCN.” Speaking further, the NMA President lamented that in the last two weeks, the association had lost six members because they were ‘‘overwhelmed with work overload and had stress-related death.”
He said currently, doctors in Nigeria were working below the World Health Organisation, WHO’s standard, which prescribed a ratio of one doctor to 600 patients (1:600), as against one doctor to over 200,000 patients (1: 200,000), obtainable in Nigeria.
“By law,” he continued, “doctors are supposed to work for only 40 units. We have doctors working for up to 80 units. If you want me to work more than 40 units, pay me for more than 40 units. So if you want to enforce it, maybe we should start from there.”
He decried a situation where government at the states and federal levels claimed they don’t have money to employ doctors, but embark on “white elephants projects some of them may not even complete. It is a shame for this country.”
Poor vaccination reflecting on the theme for the 2017 Physicians’ Week, which he said called for sober reflection, the NMA president said:
“The 2006/2017 immunisation coverage survey indicates that only 33 percent of children, aged 12 to 23 months, had three doses of vaccine against the global target of 90 percent and only 23 percent were fully immunised. 40 percent do not receive any vaccines.”
