I am not sure if the above question is meant to be answered by neither you nor me. Yet given our present situation where the National Association of Resident Doctors has down tools, we have no alternative than to find answers to it. Let me state from the onset, before my mission is misconstrued that to go on strike is the right of the worker; as it is the duty of any employer to ensure that the wages of employees are meant to be settled. I also believe that the employee cannot go it alone without the employer.
We are at a stage that patients in all tertiary health institutions have been asked to find alternatives where they can be attended to; pending when the strike action embarked upon by the NARD would have been resolved. Even if you don’t have a relation in any of the hospitals, by the mere fact that your colleague, neighbor or indeed an acquaintance has been asked to move out of the wards to anywhere they could find cure; is sufficient reason to ask what the problem is.
Perhaps those of you who have a mental picture of the patients in different health conditions leaving hospital wards may know what it feels to be sent home to get well, die and or get worst by the day. Imagine what the patients may go through even before they find the needed attention elsewhere; that is if indeed they survive before help arrives.
Like everyone that is concerned about life we should be asking questions on why we are faced with the situation in our hands. And like all sane people, I thought it is about time that employers; whether it is government or private took their employees with some seriousness on account of salaries and other emoluments.
Due largely to the pandemic, front-line health workers have had a lot to chew as a result of the continuing spike in the numbers of infected persons in Nigeria. It meant therefore that a lot more was expected of them in the war to contend with the development; just as government is needed to up the ante by working more to provide logistics as that is what should be done to get the battle won.
Perhaps you may recall that on May 30, 2020, the National Association of Resident Doctors issued a 14-day ultimatum to the federal government to ensure addressing some of their pending demands, amongst which included the non-payment of Covid-19 inducement allowances. The warning came during a press briefing after the 40th Ordinary General Meeting of the association in Bauchi by the President of the Association, Aliyu Sokombo.
The warning was intended to say that in the event that the association’s demands are not met by the time the ultimatum ended, ‘the doctor’s union threatened to embark on an industrial strike’. That should have sent the signals that there was danger lurking for government; and if you may add, the patients in the hospitals where they are found, as they are always left to bear the brunt if anything in this regard takes place.
But the danger was in the doctors abandoning their patients when they needed them most. Was it right if we might ask, if at a time when their services are needed most in a pandemic that they should embark on the strike?
The doctors were emphatic in their demands, which included the payment of “the recent Covid-19 inducement allowance that was widely speculated to have been paid to doctors and other health workers. Another is the immediate recall of sacked resident doctors at the Jos University Teaching Hospital and payment of their salaries’. They also want a universal implementation of the Resident Training Act in federal and state Teaching Hospitals.
The association is advocating for the provision of funding for Medical Residency Training in the 2021 Appropriation bill, as well as payment of all arrears, owed its members in the federal and states tertiary health institutions, arising from the consequential adjustment of the National minimum wage. I am informed that after graduating from medical school, officially one becomes a physician. ‘Although one is now a doctor, additional training is still ahead in the form of a medical residency. A medical residency differs from medical school in a lot of ways.
‘The painful decision’ following the inability of the Federal Government to meet its demands has now landed us where we dreaded: Patients have been asked to vacate the hospitals; even as we are faced with a health challenge never experienced before in our history. The fact that the association had asked that government makes ‘alternative arrangements for the care of the patients as the strike shall be total and indefinite’, is enough to have jolted those responsible into action.
While it was apparent that the warning had categorically stated that, ‘no service of any kind, be it emergency, care at Covid-19 isolation and treatment centers shall be exempted’, the sympathy that statement offered to ‘the patients and the Nigerian populace’, may not have carried the needed weight or even meant anything given the enormity of the losses families would have incurred when the chips are down.
Our attention must be shifted to this development, as we are all involved in it. Our health challenges have put us all at a risk. Health personnel, whether they are in the tertiary institutions or in our villages need to be protected before they can provide the needed attention to patients. The association has harped on the fact that; ‘provision of grossly inadequate appropriate Personal Protective Equipment for all health care workers; immediate reversal of the illegal disengagement of all 26 resident doctors in Jos University Teaching Hospital, and the payment of all salaries owed them, in keeping with provisions of the Medical Residency Training Act’.
Some of the demands it has been gathered were negotiated years ago. Over the years, they were not fulfilled, thereby sadly going into repeat circles of strikes that should have been avoided. The government appears to be repeatedly responsible for the circles of strikes. The Nigerian situation creates room for unnecessary strikes; it is as if government celebrates strikes by creating the room and conditions suitable for such.
Taking a look at all of the above, they are weighty as they should not be left unattended. The pandemic opened up the challenges the health sector in Nigeria did not envisage it had. Even while living in self-denial of what government seemed to have put on ground, the pandemic opened the Pandora box of what may not have been done as a nation. Increasingly, the nation seemed to have lived in immolation of what was available, but kept other economies engaged as highly-placed government officials and individuals were seen visiting foreign medical facilities in droves at the detriment of our national health institutions.
It was the outbreak of the China coronavirus that put paid to the hitherto highly priced institutions. The pandemic made non-sense of those institutions as well as reduced the records of our yearly budgets on health as mere palliatives for a season. It showed that attention was needed to be brought to bear on our health institutions if we wanted to change the song that should suit Nigerians.
This benign image of attention in the past on our health sector in more ways than one during the pandemic has given several nations the opportunity to retune their concentration ‘antennae’ and place it appropriately where it can benefit such nations.
The resident doctors are a force to be reckoned with; which is why work and patients always suffer when they go on strike. The point of entry into their training makes them a large group, no doubt using such to great advantage; and to be able to bargain with strength. Little wonder that we are where we are today.
The strike coming at this critical time is a bit off for discussion, yet to think that government was well aware of it coming puts us in no place than to think that government enjoys things leading to such actions. No one can deny the fact that the government has tried on several counts, even as it is coming at a time government is making ensuring hard to convince the National Association of Resident Doctors to call off its strike which began June 15, 2020.
Already in order to convince Nigerians, government says it ‘has paid a total of N9 billion to fourteen insurance companies as group life insurance premium for health workers that are engaged in the fight against the spread Covid-19 pandemic disease in Nigeria. The federal government has paid N9 billion to 14 insurance companies for group life insurance for all health workers in the federal public health institutions and there is also a top-up for some categories of the health professionals.’
Currently the people are suffering. We know that dialogue can go a long way at solving the debacle, to continue to flex muscles on the graves of Nigerians who may have died as a result of the development is perhaps to imagine we have not taken any lesson from what may have happened in the past.
The people matter, no doubt. Whether all the salaries in the world are paid only to doctors, there is a lot of good things that are needed to be done to the people. Take it or leave it, to solve the problem is to undertake to fix our medical facilities; and this involves government, doctors and we who go to them for medical advice.