BEVERLY HILLS, August 22, (THEWILL) – The Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN) has faulted the Federal Government’s sacking of 16,000 Resident Doctors across the country, saying it will greatly affect the delivery of specialist health care services in Nigeria.
The Association condemned the development at a meeting held to deliberate on the suspension of Residency Training for Resident Doctors, warning of the grave consequences .
MDCAN President , Dr. Steven Oluwole, said, in a statement issued Thursday after the meeting , that special care baby units, neurosurgery, cardiothoracic surgery, oncology and other specialties would be greatly affected the suspension.
The Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, had announced the suspension of Residency Training Programme for Resident Doctors, last week thus worsening the lingering face –off between the Federal Government and the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA).
MDCAN warned that if the suspension is allowed to continue, it will interrupt the on-going training and production of specialists, likely to take another 10 years to achieve, in the event of the eventual suspension of the programme.
“It is not clear to the MDCAN how Mr. President intends to recruit trainees into the Programme; It is not clear how Junior and Senior Residents will be produced during the take off of the Programme, or perhaps we will wait for the next five to 10 years to produce the first batch of senior residents; It is not clear how the special care baby units, neurosurgery, cardiothoracic surgery, oncology and other specialists will be recreated to produce tertiary level care if this programme takes off.
“This suspension, which truncates more than four decades of investments in medical training, presents a future too bleak to contemplate,” Oluwole said in the statement.
Lamenting that as Medical Consultants and trainers of Resident Doctors, they were not consulted before announcing the suspension, he said: “Members of the MDCAN, who are the trainers of the resident doctors, were not consulted before taking a decision of this monumental magnitude. The residency training programme is designed to produce specialists in all fields of the practice of medicine. Although the programme commenced in Nigeria over 40 years ago, it is still being developed, and remodeled.”
The association also described as aberration, a situation in which the President is the de facto Director of Residency.
“The MDCAN is not aware of any country in the history of residency training where the Director of Residency Training is the Head of State. While the Honourable Minister of Health, the Chief Medical Adviser to Mr. President, is a Professor of Medicine and a trainer of residents, and while doctors of repute have covertly or overtly supported and endorsed this aberrant innovation, the MDCAN strongly recommends Mr. President to suspend further development and continuation of mechanism, arrangement, and purport that have been put in place to drive or to execute this project which we predict will spell doom for tertiary health care delivery in Nigeria”, the MDCAN President stated.
