Ending the government, doctors’ feud

While the strike lasted, it disrupted much needed health care delivery across hospitals in the country, resulting in avoidable mortality.  Considering the issues in contention, the strike should not have been allowed to commence in the first place. For instance, issues of what category of health workers should be called “consultants” or the restoration of […]

While the strike lasted, it disrupted much needed health care delivery across hospitals in the country, resulting in avoidable mortality.  Considering the issues in contention, the strike should not have been allowed to commence in the first place. For instance, issues of what category of health workers should be called “consultants” or the restoration of the position of “deputy chairman, medical advisory committee” as well as the review of “hazard allowance” that formed the core of NMA’s grievances should have been ironed out procedurally between the NMA and the Federal Ministry of Health without letting these result into precipitate action of strike, much less allow it to drag on for nearly two months with all the unhappy results.
The strike therefore indicates a certain dysfunction between the government and worker organisations in the health sector, illustrated in the inflexible stance of both parties on which side should act first even when a tentative working agreement had been reached. On the onset of the strike, government issued a few entreaties, cajoling and threats, to persuade the striking doctors to go back to their duties, all to no avail, and then promptly issued a directive through the Ministry of Health suspending all resident doctors working in government hospitals. That step further deepened the crisis, and hardened positions. Meanwhile, the doctors ignored calls by concerned Nigerians and other stakeholders to consider the incipient threat of the Ebola, and call off the strike.  
 Now that a fragile accord has been reached, the government should recognise that its punitive measures against the resident doctors, while understandable in the face of their truculent behaviour, are not helpful.  Moreover, in a profession that is in dire need of well trained specialised personnel, the resident doctors are in the pipeline to become the next batch of specialists that would perform the critical duties of health care delivery in future. Therefore singling them out for punishment for the action of the NMA as a professional organisation to which the resident doctors rightly belong was not fair.
It is likely that a prolonged suspension of their residency programme could force many of them to look elsewhere to gain the needed expertise they seek to acquire; and in a profession where brain -drain is alarming, the suspension measure should not have been taken.  The insistence by the government that the NMA call of its strike as a condition to lift the suspension of residency programme could be a good bargaining position, but it does not portray the government in good light, because if the resolutions of previous agreements with the NMA had been implemented, there would have been no need to come to this pass.   The longer the stalemate is allowed to persist, so long would innocent people die needlessly.
The strike may have ended but the point must be made that NMA, like the academic union of the universities, has become a body that has turned the strike action into a fetish, incessantly disrupting what should be seamless delivery of health services. The NMA therefore needs to inculcate patience and recognise that the health sector is all-important to the wellbeing of the nation. Similarly government, on its own part, must always act in such a way not to unwittingly impede the smooth running of its own business by honouring agreements its officials signed off on.
Taking recalcitrant and entrenched positions on matters that impinge on the health of the people that could be resolved speedily with good sense and maturity is callous and irresponsible on the part of those directly involved.