President Bola Tinubu’s national policy on health workforce migration to manage the exodus abroad of skilled Nigerian healthcare professionals may come to nothing if the government’s embargo on employment in the health sector is not repealed.
Chairman of the Medical and Dental Consultants’ Association of Nigeria (MDCAN) at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, Dr Foluke Fasola, speaking at a press briefing to herald its annual general meeting at the hospital in Ibadan on Monday, said the FG’s embargo on employment for health workers is a motivator for even those that would have stayed back to work in Nigeria to relocate, too.
Fasola, flanked by Dr Kolawole Akande, Dr David Aderinto, Dr Emmanuel Jite, and Dr Olusola Ibiyemi, who are the vice chairman, general secretary, assistant general secretary, and ex-officio 1 of the association, respectively, declared that inadequate staffing is the most severe of the challenges in the health sector that is negatively impacting patient care.
“A doctor that is probably to attend to 14 to 15 patients is now attending to 50 patients; it becomes very stressful and demanding for that doctor. Certain that the doctor will be burnt out. When at the ward, you expect to see a nurse to assist you.
“Maybe there are only one or two nurses on the ward with so many patients so that the nurse is not available to know what the doctor expects from the patient. All these impact the patient, and it’s important that we get this address.
“We know that a lot of medical personnel are leaving the country. This is contributed to by the poor remuneration in addition to the work environment in the sense that the facilities that you need to work with might not be available and you have to do a lot of improvising.
“One of the solutions is to improve the remuneration of the healthcare workers. However, I know that there are healthcare workers outside who need employment but are not being employed.
“There are some government policies that are stifling the employment process because even before the usual japa Syndrome, we were understaffed.
“Even the embargo on employment had prompted the japa syndrome. If you’re a doctor or a nurse, you need employment, and they say there’s an embargo on employment. Certainly that will motivate you to relocate. So, some of the relocations was as a result of the government policy on the embargo on employment.
“And when people are employed again, another problem is that the payment doesn’t come immediately. Some people wait months before they are paid. I had colleagues who waited nine months without pay just because some policies in the Ministry of Health would not allow them to be incorporated into the IPPS to be paid.
“So the issue of JAPA syndrome is not just about remunerations; it is about the government policy about employment and people being unpaid. Even the little we are getting, they should be paid when employed immediately, not waiting for several months before they are paid.”
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