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Tag: Doctors

  • Doctors urge police to beef up security in hospitals

    Doctors under the aegis of Association of General and Private Medical Practitioners of Nigeria (AGPMPN) have raised the alarm on the unprecedented abduction of their colleagues, especially in Rivers State.

    They spoke at the weekend,  during  the National Executive Council (NEC) meeting of the Association in Port Harcourt, Rivers State capital.

    National President of AGPMPN,  Dr.  Omo-Ehijele Frank Odafen, condemned the recurring abduction of doctors,  noting that some of their members had lost their lives in the hands of suspected kidnappers.

    Dr.  Odafen urged government and security agencies to provide armed security men for doctors to enable them carry out their social responsibility effectively without fear of being abducted or killed.

    He said: “Doctors are not wealthy  people.  Doctors are not receiving brown envelopes. Doctors are committed people.  We practice social service for the nation.  We are appealing to the society and kidnappers to leave doctors alone.  We don’t have money.  We are struggling people.

    “We are appealing to the government, especially Rivers State government.  We thank the government and security agencies too. But,  we are appealing to the government,  please,  provide armed security men for doctors at their residential homes and offices.”

  • Doctors in Diaspora to hold seminar on infectious diseases

    Doctors in Diaspora to hold seminar on infectious diseases

    Doctors in Diaspora are to hold, for the first time in Nigeria, their yearly global infectious diseases initiative today at the Oriental Hotel, Lekki, Lagos.

    The event is being facilitated by Dr. Folarin Olubowale, a member of the American Board of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases.

    He said this is 10th edition of the semiar and that it is aimed at helping them to find ways to eradicate the  diseases.

    The decision to hold the first African edition in Nigeria, instead of the United States, where it had been holding, he said, was  to enable doctors tackle infectious diseases.

    The event will feature lectures by medical practitioners and the focus will be to create awareness on the diseases, seek collaboration, and scholarship funding; develop a centre of excellence for infectious diseases in the country.

    A 2.5-credit point will be awarded to participating medical students for their continuous medical education (CME) training.

    Speakers expected are Dr. Regis Nadin, an Haitian-American emergency medicine physician; Dr. Yoav Golan, a practitioner at Tufts Medical Centre, Boston, Massachussetts , US and Prof Folashade Tolulope Ogunsola of the Clinical Microbiology Deparment at the University of Lagos (UNILAG).

    According to Public Health Physician, National Orthopaedic Hospital, Igbobi, Dr. Chira Udoka, the seminar will equip participants with the expertise to manage some  diseases.

    “Nigeria is chosen because we want to give back to our homeland. That  is why we, in the western world, know that we are not immune to these diseases. The initiative will help to showcase control strategies, prevention and control; so, it does not go around.

    “The recent findings on diseases, such as malaria, Ebola, and meningitis, which Nigeria will benefit from, will help us to know what we are dealing with,” Udoka said.

  • Association lauds Fed Govt for granting doctors’ request

    The Association of Clinical and Academic Physiotherapists of Nigeria (ACAPN) has lauded the Federal Government for approving that Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria should handle the central posting of house officers.

    This demand has often formed one of the reasons medical doctors go on strike, and at its meeting on June 8, the Federal Executive Council came out with the resolution.

    In a statement, the ACAPN President, Prof Adesoji Rufus Adedoyin, said: “We acknowledge the laudable role of the honourable Minister of Health, Prof Isaac Adewole, in making this possible. This step will facilitate prompt placement of house officers for internship and eradicate redundancy. We congratulate the honourable minister on this feat.

    “Key among these health professionals are physiotherapists. Fresh Physiotherapy graduates are faced with the herculean task of securing a placement on time for their internship training. This has been the case for years. Now that succour is on the way, it will be unfair to exclude Physiotherapy from this arrangement. We are of the opinion that, the central posting arrangement should be extended to MRTB, our regulatory body, in order to take care of the interests of our fresh graduates too.”

    Adedoyin, who is of the Department of Medical Rehabilitation, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State, stressed that the inclusion of Physiotherapy in the posting arrangement would not only solve the perennial problems fresh graduates face in securing internship placements, but would also portray the government and the Ministry of Health as being fair to all.

  • Click Here to See what Doctors Recommend to Enlarge Your Small Manhood and Last 25 Minutes During Sex!

    Click Here to See what Doctors Recommend to Enlarge Your Small Manhood and Last 25 Minutes During Sex!

    My name is Mrs.Rose, and I got married to my husband about 2 years ago. We have one kid already and when we started the marriage, our sex life was great.

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    Listen, the main reason why I decided to share our true life story is because I know that millions of Nigerian men suffer from this poor erections and quick ejaculation problem.

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  • Nigeria saves $6bn from training doctors locally

    Nigeria saves $6bn from training doctors locally

    Prof. Ademola Olaitan, President, National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria, on Thursday said that the college had saved more than $5 billion for the country by training doctors locally.

    Olaitan disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.

    He said that before the college was set up in 1979, the Federal Government usually sent doctors abroad for training, spending about $200,000 each year, for five years.

    The professor said such training overseas had now been taken over by the college, saving the government resources.

    “After 1979, the college started training doctors and so far, we have produced no fewer than 5,338 postgraduate doctors.

    “If you calculate this, then, you can get an idea of how much the country has saved from foreign training.

    “Yearly, the number of graduates increases. Last year, we graduated no fewer than 500 doctors.

    “The previous year, we had no fewer than 300; each year, the number increases; our main focus is that each year we produce more doctors for the nation.

    “Another thing is that if every doctor that is training in Nigeria went abroad to receive training, we would not have the number of doctors we see today rendering services in our hospitals.

    “They would have been rendering their services abroad.

    “These are some of the benefits the college has given to society since it was set up,” Olaitan said.

    He said that despite the college’s commitment to giving doctors quality and world standard training, it was being faced with financial challenges, hindering it from achieving some of its mandate.

    He said that most benefits accruing to the universities from the Ministry of Education was denied the college, even though it could be termed a medical university.

    “If the college can even receive just five to 10 per cent of the amount it has saved for government, this will go a long way in moving the college forward.

    “Recently, we asked the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) to fund our clinical simulation laboratory, but the request was not granted.

    “This laboratory is supposed to help us to change the system of our doctors treating patients,’’ said the don.

  • Doctors’ exodus

    Doctors’ exodus

    •Nigeria must address the challenges leading to migration of its doctors 

    For a country with an acute shortage of medical doctors, media reports that 10,000 – 15,000 doctors have left the country in search of greener pastures overseas is troubling.  Dr Mike Ogirima, President, Nigerian Medical Association (NMA), who revealed this added that between 40,000 and 60,000 doctors are currently working in the country.  A top member of the association was quoted as saying that in 2015 alone, 715 doctors left Nigeria. “Annually, the number of Nigerian doctors departing the country to work abroad ranges between 500 to 700”.  In April, over 500 doctors took examination for possible recruitment placement abroad.

    “Their final destination is, however, the United States (U.S.), which offers them better remuneration and welfare package. For these Nigerian doctors working in the UK, Canada and other countries, including the Caribbean, is a stepping stone,” the source said. The fact that not many people can watch helplessly as their patients die due to lack of working tools compounds the migration. Indeed, the frustration has made many doctors to abandon medicine for more rewarding ventures while some are not even keen on renewing their registration.

    The trend is particularly worrisome because the exodus means more workload for doctors in the country. Whereas the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended one doctor to 600 patients, the doctor-patient ratio in Nigeria is one to 4,250 patients! Nigeria may not be the only country in Africa with such a huge doctor-patient ratio deficit; its case is worsened by the fact that it is a country with enormous resources unlike some African countries.  Cuba has the best doctor-patient ratio – one to 170; the United States is one doctor to 390 patients and Australia, one doctor to 400.

    It is sad that the exodus of Nigerian doctors which gained momentum in the late 1980s is worsening rather than abate. The issue back then was usually about low remuneration and lack of working tools. Indeed, in 1983 when the soldiers sacked the then Shagari administration for corruption, one of the major issues adduced for the coup was that our hospitals had become “mere consulting clinics”.

    It is regrettable that not much has changed since then. An evidence of this is the inability of many doctors who graduated for the past three to four years to get suitable health facilities as placement for residency training because most of the state hospitals do not meet the criteria for the programme. There is also the problem of non-payment of salaries for months. Indeed, the environment is too hostile for comfort.

    We join stakeholders in calling for a better welfare and improved working conditions for doctors to check the dangerous trend. Many Nigerians resort to quack doctors while many turn to alternative medical practitioners, many of whom are not competent to practice. Many people simply turn to their churches for miracle healing.

    Our governments must rise to the occasion. Hospitals should have constant electricity supply, water supply as well as basic equipment to treat patients. Doctors must be well remunerated for the special service they render. Many of our hospitals need upgrading; they should be upgraded. We have seen that there is nothing wrong with our doctors as they are in hot demand outside the country. What they lack are the necessary tools to work with. These should be provided.

    Our efforts to reduce costs on medical tourism will come to naught if we continue to neglect the health sector. A situation where the country continues to lose its young and bright doctors to other countries can only compound our health challenges in the future. We must make concerted efforts to redress the situation.

  • How is digital transformation changing the medical profession?

    With robots and algorithms taking over healthcare, what does the future hold for medical practitioners?

    The future of personal healthcare goes something like this. An asthma patient wakes up and looks at their smartphone. ‘Good morning,’ it says, ‘how is your breathing?’ The patient logs a few answers that are sent to their doctor and stored on a server, which then analyses trends and triggers an alert if something is abnormal.

    Doctors can provide more personalised service by being able to drill down into specific information to find root causes and triggers, and provide an accurate diagnosis.They also don’t need to physically wade through tons of research, test results and patient records.

    Now,I’m not a doctor, but I would imagine that medical professionals enter the field because they want to help people and are interested in physiology and anatomy; not because they dream of going through masses of paperwork. Yet for many doctors this is a reality, and focusing on the patient is sometimes difficult.

    Nurses too, are often weighed down by admin and a myriad of regulationsrather than patient care. But digital transformation is changing this. From systems that automatically track a patient’s history, DNA and medical records,to virtual screenings, there are a host of benefitsbeyond simplyreducing paperwork.

    Internet of Things making patients smarter
    Most digital transformation in the medical space is driven by the Internet of Things, which is enabling patients to perform their own tests at home. For example, blood sugar information can be fed to a database via a connected skin patch worn by a diabetic. In fact, the healthcare Internet of Things market segment is poised to hit $117 billion by 2020.

    Another example is CellScope, which connects to a user’s smartphone enabling them to carry out low-cost scans of moles, rashes and ear infections. These images are sent to a medical practitioner and stored on a server, which processes the scan and detects abnormal patterns. Soon patients will be able to perform their own ECG tests at home. Most heart disease is identified only after patients have heart attacks, but with people performing their own tests it not only lowers the cost and barrier to entry for an expensive procedure, but machine learning can identify and predict episodes before they happen.

    In Cameroon, Cardiopadis able to perform heart screenings with a tablet device, and Matibabu in Uganda enables people to diagnose malaria using a finger clip connected to their smartphone. The clip uses light and magnetism to analyse blood cell composition.
    In the Middle East,AlemHealth enables people with periodic access to healthcare to have a scan at an AlemHealth centre, which gets sent to a community of world-class specialists around the world.

    So where does this leave medical professionals?

    Having all of this data is one thing, but doctors still don’t have time to be buried in it. It is predicted that there will be a need for medical data planners, or case managers, whose job it is to understand the data and liaise with patients. The physician will take on more of a supervisory role,rather than provide direct care. Doctors may appear less at the bedside with nurses likely to go back to the principal role of care providers. And now, smart devices can make a nurse’s job much easier. For example, there was a time when a nurse’s constant focus would be to ensure a steady flow of an IV. Now IVs are electronically monitored and errors are automatically sent to the nurse’s device via remote monitoring.

    Like doctor like computer
    Some in the field suggest that much of what a doctor does can in fact be replaced by computers. A doctor is required to think like a computer: Analysing information from tests, data on diseases andpatient history. Then, aftertaking all these factors into account,they perform a diagnosis. With sensors enabling patients to log their own test results and cloud serversto digest all thedata, computers can perform diagnoses much quicker.

    The future of health relies on the notion of Artificial Intelligence (AI), or the capability of IT systems to sense the world, comprehend, act and learn. A computer can easily digest 5,000 research articles on diabetes while a human’scognitive limitations prevent them from remembering the 10,000+ diseases humans can get.

    Already in the airline industry, computers are able to do the job of a pilot where human judgement is required. Market traders are making use of algorithms to predict the stock market, and self-driving cars are starting to show zero incidents. Computers can and will start making accurate diagnoses. Already, a study by Lifecom showed thatclinical trials,with medical assistants using a diagnostic knowledge engine, were 91% accurate without using labs, imaging, or exams.

    We’re entering a new era where digital experiences mirror the way people interact with one another and we move from a world where we must understand computers to one where they understand us and our intent and can be proactive. Systems of intelligence will endemically transform the way we innovate and transform for improved outcomes and the way we optimise clinical and operational processes. People across the healthcare continuum are able to collaborate and use machine learning to come up with ways to improve outcomes for patients.

    However, computers can’t replace the emotional nuances, the judgement calls, and the complex and intuitive nature involved in patient care, which goes further than processing data. Physicians will just need to enhance their digital skills and work hand in hand with technology. Already a surgeon’s principal tool is no longer a knife. They have to operate alongside computer consoles and robotic wrists, while watching a high-resolution screen.

    It’s a reality, and an exciting one. The future of healthcare looks bright, with smart, accurate and accessible care that frees up medicalprofessionals to do what they set out to in the first place.

  • Doctors in Kogi suspend 10-day old strike

    Doctors in Kogi suspend 10-day old strike

    The Kogi chapter of Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has suspended its 10-day old strike to give room for dialogue with State Government.

    In a statement issued after its Ordinary General Meeting (OGM) in Lokoja on Saturday, signed by its Chairman, Dr. Godwin Tijani, the association said the decision to suspend the strike was unanimously taken to honour the Kogi paramount ruler, Attah Igala, and other imminent stakeholders, for their intervention.

    “NMA has agreed to suspend its strike for two weeks to enable prominent personalities and stakeholders, mediate.

    “Since the Attah of Igala, NMA National President and our honourable members of the House of Assembly have requested the association to suspend the action and give them time to intervene, we have no choice than to honour them.

    “We will reconvene in a forth night to decide on the way forward if no positive progress is made and our demands are not met.

    The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Kogi chapter of NMA had directed its members to embark on indefinite strike from May 3, alleging government’s failure to pay doctors’ salaries and arrears, among other demands. (NAN)

  • Doctors decry unpaid salary balance

    Doctors decry unpaid salary balance

    Doctors under the aegis of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) in Osun State yesterday protested unpaid balance of their 22-month salary, at the House of Assembly.

    The demonstrators, who carried placards, alleged that the half salary the government paid workers was unconstitutional, adding that the situation contributed to their poor working condition and welfare.

    NMA Chairman Dr. Tokunbo Olajumoke said doctors deserved better welfare package from the government.

    The government, however, appealed to the protesters to be patient, promising to look into their grievances.

    A statement by Mr. Semiu Okanlawon, the media aide to Governor Rauf Aregbesola, said the government would meet their demands as soon as finance improves.

    The government said paucity of funds was responsible for the unpaid balance.

    The statement reads: “Governor Aregbesola is working to satisfy different categories of workers, as he reiterated in his address during the Workers’ Day on May 1.

    “This challenge is a general problem in the country. The governor is working to expand the state’s economic coast and improve its finance.

    “Nobody can fault the passion and love of the governor towards the workers, you could feel his emotion in a statement he issued on May Day. Obviously, he is ready to go to any length to make them happy and compensate them for what they have contributed in terms of sacrifice for the survival of this administration in the face of recession.

    “The government has invested in rehabilitating hospitals. Funding of the health sector has increased, as we can see in the budgets.

    “Osun has the second highest number of primary healthcare centres in the country. The state is working to improve the health sector.”

  • Doctors reject harmonised pay with nurses, others

    Doctors reject harmonised pay with nurses, others

    The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) has called on the Federal Government to shelve its planned harmonisation of salaries of health workers in the country.

    The association’s position is contained in a communiqué issued by President of NMA, Mike Ogirima, yesterday at the end of the 57th Annual General Meeting and Delegates Conference of the association, in Calabar, from April 24 to 29.

    It noted that although health workers faced many hazards in the discharge of their duties, their output could not be compared to doctors who performed the bulk of the medical services.

    “There is an attempt to harmonise the salaries and the Federal Ministry of Health is at the lead of that attempt, which is currently causing a lot of disharmony in the health sector.

    “Medical doctors are highly skilled and few in the country. The cut-off mark for medical students now is 280 and above. Everybody wants to accept that title of doctor in the medical set up and we are not against that.

    “What we are against is the fact that everybody cannot be equated to be equal. In the animal kingdom, all animals are equal; but some are more equal than others,” it said.

    The association said it was not against moves to enhance the welfare of other health workers, but insisted that relativity should be maintained.

    “We are not saying that the welfare of other medical workers should not be taken care of, but that relativity should be maintained when we talk of salaries of health workers in the hospitals.

    “The NMA is calling on government to evaluate different professionals in the health sector and audit the output they put at work.

    “With that, there will be more objective data and statistics to buttress our point, asking for maintenance of the relativity,” it added.

    The communiqué lamented the deteriorating state of infrastructure in public health institutions across the country and called on governments at all levels to place premium on developing the sector.

    It called on the Federal Government to be proactive by having a strong rapid emergency response team to handle outbreak of diseases, just as it stressed the need to resume local production of vaccines.

    On the outbreak of Cerebral Spinal Meningitis across the country, the NMA condemned the poor handling of the outbreak in some states.

    The NMA ratified the adoption of the association’s seal/stamp for medical practitioners to check quackery in the profession.