Resident doctors call off 5-day warning strike

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that this followed an agreement reached with the management of the hospital after the intervention of the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) and elders of the union.

The Association of Resident Doctors (ARD), FMC Gusau branch, had embarked on a five-day warning strike action last Wednesday over the refusal by the management of the hospital to address various issues affecting their welfare.

The branch President of the association, Dr Bayo Adeniyun, told NAN in Gusau on Friday that their major grievance with the management of the hospital bordered on poor working conditions.

Adeniyun said: “We (doctors) have problem with the management on training policy, in fact its training policy contradict the civil service rule.

“There is abnormality in the training policy of this hospital as it says whenever a medical doctor was promoted he will not go for training again, which is contrary to civil service rules and this policy is not being practiced in other medical centres across the country.

“Another issue is that of house officers welfare. As I am talking now if you go to house officers’ quarters you see that they are having problem with water supply.”

According to him, another issue that the association is having problem with the management is that of shortage of human resources in the hospital, most especially medical doctors.

“We have been asking the management of this centre to employ new doctors so as to reduce the problem of inadequacy of human resources.

“As I am talking to you now, this centre has the least number of medical doctors across all the federal medical centres in the country.

“Here in FMC Gusau a single doctor will attend to about 50 patients per day, as against the WHO standard of 10 persons per doctor in a day,” the president said.

He said that the ARD have been calling on the management to recruit more doctors to address this issue in order to improve the standard of the hospital in terms of human resources but it has been only promising, but nothing was done up to now.

“We have had several meetings with the management over these issues, we have been silent for long and following the management but no decision taken by the management to resolve these issues,” he said.

Adesiyu confirmed that the association yesterday met with the management of the hospital through the intervention of the NMA, heads of department and elders of the association.

“Based on our discussions with the management, they promised to resolve some of our grievances, that is why we called off the strike today,’’ the president said.