Dr Paul John, Port Harcourt
Sir: I recently came across the blazing headline – ‘’Nigeria to import doctors from Europe, United States” in one of our major newspapers attributed to Health Minister Osagie Ehanire. What we currently have is export of Nigerian doctors to Europe through (IELTS, OET and PLAB) and to the United states (through USMLE). It may also interest our minister of health to know that we are also exporting our medical doctors through Prometric examinations to Oman and other Asian countries.
The first question to ask is which hospital in Nigeria will the expatriate doctors work? Is it Aso Rock clinic which our outspoken first lady once told Nigerians, in 2017, had no syringes let alone an X-ray machine? Or our tertiary hospitals that cannot boast of 24 hours of power supply daily?
How many times has the minister paid an unscheduled visit to our tertiary hospitals after 2pm during week days to ascertain the states of laboratory and radiological investigations? I need not talk of what happens there during the weekends.
And who will provide security for the expatriate doctors? Maybe the minister has not heard that a doctor on call in one of the tertiary hospitals was once kidnapped right inside the hospital. Her colleagues continued work the next day. Thank God she was later released and as usual, her family opted to remain silent on whether ransom was paid or not.
And how much will the expatriate doctors will be paid? Is it the so-called CONMESS (Consolidated Medical Salary Scheme) which does not reflect the current socioeconomic realities?
The minister needs to inform Nigerians how many radiotherapy machines that are working in this country before importing his expatriate doctors. If one does not have a cancer patient, one will not know what cancer patients are suffering in this country. Imagine a cancer patient travelling all the way from Cross River state to Ibadan for radiotherapy and after surviving deaths on our death-traps called federal highways, the cancer patient would be told that the machine was faulty hence he has to wait for the repair or move to Zaria or National Hospital Abuja for another marathon race.
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No wonder a foreign journalist once described Nigerians as people that import what they have and export what they do not have.
What our health sector needs is a complete overhaul and restructuring. Where is the motivation for the young doctors in Nigeria? Is the minister aware that most young doctors after university stay at home for close to two years before securing a place to do the mandatory one year internship (housemanship) programme? Is he aware that there are Nigerian doctors with primary results but cannot secure a place for residency programme?
May be he is not aware that some chief medical doctors of our tertiary hospitals are now using medical officers to replace resident doctors, a development Nigerians will soon pay dearly for when it will be mandatory for every patient needing specialist care to travel abroad to meet medical specialists . What happened to the much-touted central placement of house officers proposed and approved by his predecessor or has that been jettisoned as usual?
I hope our minister will ask the expatriate doctors to come with their medical equipment because it is not exaggeration to say that some of the X-ray machines we have in the country are what Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, a German mechanical engineer and physicist, used on 8 November 1895 to discover X-rays or Röntgen rays.
How many tertiary hospitals in this country can boast of functional diagnostic machines like MRI, CT, PET scan machines just to mention but a few? Will the expatriate doctors agree to work with our current doctor-patient ratio and be expected to perform optimally? Which foreign medical doctor will be ready to consult for more than 100 patients during an outpatient clinic day and will not run back to his country the next day because that is crazy and unimaginable?
Instead of importing doctors into the country, the government should sponsor our healthcare professionals abroad to learn certain procedures and how to operate certain medical equipment. What percentage of Nigeria’s budget should be appropriated to our health sector according to our National Health Act? Has that percentage been implemented in this country? Even at that there is no effective mechanism to check the diversion of the paltry sum released into these hospitals into private pockets.
Let the minister look into the health sector holistically instead of playing to the gallery. There is a limit to politicking, and human lives should not be used to score political points.
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