Editorial
No matter the justification, that the management of Benue State University Teaching Hospital (BSUTH), Makurdi, would dismiss 30 of resident doctors at the height of the ravaging COVID-19 pandemic is, to put it mildly, troubling.
The doctors, said to have exceeded the six years that their residency training required, were summarily handed their letters of disengagement, ostensibly to make room for other trainee resident doctors.
The issues are quite straight-forward. The institution claims to be running a six-year residency training programme, hence the doctors ought to have exited to create space for other trainees.
The doctors, on their part, believe that the action by the BSUTH management should not have been oblivious of the time it took the department to get accreditation to train residents.
They also cite the Medical Residency Training Act, 2017, signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2018. That law, they maintain, allows them a period of between eight-and-a-half to nine years, as against the six years prescribed by the management of BSUTH, to sit for and pass all relevant examinations.
Finally, they refer to a letter from the National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria (NPMCN), to chief medical directors of all teaching hospitals requiring each institution to send its database of residents in training, so that the college would issue letters as per residents that had overstayed the training.
With none of the resident doctors at BSUTH included on the list, they question where the management got powers to sack them.
Calling for immediate withdrawal of the sack letters and reinstatement of those already sacked; the adoption and full implementation of the 2017 MRTA as it is obtainable in other training institutions across the country, the Association of Resident Doctors (ARD)- BSUTH warned that failure to do so, after 21 days, they “will have no choice than to opt for an indefinite strike.”
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We consider it unfortunate that the management would opt for a specious interpretation of the relevant statute in determining the fate of the doctors. Far beyond BSUTH’s attempt to seek justification in some internal rules or regulations – the issue is whether the doctors are asking for consideration outside the scope of the extant law or such other conditions outside of what the examining body, that sets out the rules of their training, would permit. That this is not the case raises troubling questions as to the motive of the BSUTH management at this time.
Nigerians are certainly not oblivious of the difficult conditions under which the resident doctors train. Imagine an institution which itself took years to get its accreditation right turning on its trainees for the very failures that they could, at the best of times, be deemed as vicariously culpable?
How can the same institution wield the axe so capriciously while leaving the doctors no window for remediation? It seems to us an astounding inability to see the bigger picture. That cannot be right.
The resident doctors, surely, deserve to be heard. More than that, their case, as set out, deserve sympathetic consideration. What the situation requires is flexibility on the part of the BSUTHmanagement – a sort of forbearance in the circumstance, all within the ambits of the law.
Considering that the state stands to profit more at the end of their training, we would have expected that the BSUTH authorities to show greater sensitivity more so at a time they are needed to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
We urge the Benue State government to step in, if only to stave off possible miscarriage of justice; and not least the disruption that might be occasioned, should the resident doctors make good on their threat.
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