Medical council nabs female fake doctor

The Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) on Wednesday arrested a woman who’s worked as a doctor for years using forged documents, making her the first female fake doctor on its record. Angela Njide Nwosu was arrested on the first day of her new N280,000-a-month job at a newly opened private hospital in Bwari […]

The Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) on Wednesday arrested a woman who’s worked as a doctor for years using forged documents, making her the first female fake doctor on its record.

Angela Njide Nwosu was arrested on the first day of her new N280,000-a-month job at a newly opened private hospital in Bwari council area after its management demanded MDCN to verify its new staff doctors.

Nwosu claimed to have graduated medical school 2005 at University of Nigeria, Nsukka and did housemanship at UNN’s teaching hospital, but she failed simple questions any medical student is expected to know.

She didn’t know what year she began anatomy courses, claimed to have begun anatomy courses in year one and did year-three microbiology, which no medical student does.

Tipped hand

Nwosu flagged the council when she applied for a new folio number—unique to every practising doctor in Nigeria—in attempts to get full registration.

She submitted loads of documents that inspectors have now concluded are fake after verification.

They include forms printed off the MDCN website and filled with bogus data about her internship and licences belonging to other registered doctors.

“We discovered somebody else had these numbers and she was applying for a new one. It is not done like that,” said head of the MDCN inspectorate division, Dr Henry Okwuokenye.

In the forms, she claimed to be a single 31-year-old from Agwu, Enugu.

The documents also indicate she graduated, began and finished internship and got a job all in August 2005.

But misspellings on the document were too glaring to have come from University of Nigeria or its teaching hospital.

One letterhead misspelt “Evidence” with an extra N. The other abbreviated Nigeria to Nig.

“No trace”

UNN’s college of medicine replied a request by MDCN to verify Nwosu’s attendance there, saying it had “no trace of her name nor records.”

In the document Daily Trust has seen, the college said Nwosu “categorically did not graduate from its faculty of medical sciences…from available records.”

Okwuokenye said it had been on Nwosu’s trail for more than a year after she applied for a replacement folio number while on a previous job at British America Tobacco in Ibadan.

She disappeared when the Oyo director of medical services demanded MDCN to investigate her authenticity and relocated to Abuja to work at Rouz Maternity, where she assisted in surgeries, including caesarean sections.

Rouz management is said to have given Nwosu “terminal leave” when MDCN inspectors traced her there and could face an investigations panel for not verifying her authenticity before hiring her as a doctor.

Nwosu didn’t surface until her new hospital in Bwari asked the council to run a check of its new hires.

Nwosu insisted during police questioning after her arrest that she had all her documents intact, but could face arraignment as soon as Thursday.

Investigations could widen to include the doctors whose names and contact details she appended to her forged documents as heads of the departments where she did her internship.