There is an unhealthy rivalry between medical doctors and university lecturers in Nigeria for prominence in industrial conflicts. Somehow, they have not been restrained by the Hippocratic Oath from using their indispensable services as a weapon to prise whatever they need from the hands of successive state and national administrations that are steeped in both insincerity and shoddiness when they embark on strikes. It can, of course, only get worse when the medical doctors are also university lecturers as it is in some cases.
In its latest damaging outing on a nationwide strike, the Nigeria Medical Association (NMA) listed a 24-point demand against the government, but then, it is easy to see that the strike was fuelled more by the ostensible need to be recognised as the head of the medical team which usually comprises other medical professionals like nurses, pharmacists and medical laboratory scientists.
An NMA local chairman, Professor Olayinka Buhari and the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN) Chairman Abdulmajeed Oderinde recently disagreed in separate interviews with a national newspaper over who should be the head of a medical team. While Professor Buhari, as expected, declared that doctors were the pivot of any health sector, Oderinde said that no health sector could produce a clear-cut leader as the health sector remains a holistic entity.
It is quite absurd that the health sector could be thrown into confusion on account of such cheap and trivial truculence bordering on ego trips among its professionals. The quarrel over who leads a medical team ordinarily ought not to have deteriorated to the point of costing human lives as the doctors’ strike did and it simply beggars belief that the crop of elite which dominate the professions in the health sector could condescend to needless bickering over superiority.
To be sure, the health delivery function is a team work that can fail if any unit, from the cleaner to the doctor, defaults in playing their roles well. The nurses, pharmacists, medical laboratory scientists and various cadres of technicians are all important in the ultimate goal of delivering health to the people and it is simply absurd that the question of who leads the team, as every team needs a captain, would be allowed to cripple the sector.
The claim that no health sector could produce a clear-cut leader only speaks to the crude cravings of professional egos. Who leads the health team elsewhere in more developed systems? Of course, the recognition of a leader in a team should not mean that the other members of the team are less important especially as they too are professionals in their own rights. The claim of either parity or superiority is therefore not tenable if the sector is to run smoothly.
We have had cause in past similar editorials to refer with a sense of nostalgia to the era when the Teaching Hospitals were run by House Governors. The system allowed all the professionals to flourish in their respective areas of competence. Now, these Chief Medical Directors (CMDs) of the Teaching Hospitals are arguably lost to their areas of professional competence during their tenures, bogged down as it were, with the drudgery of administrative concerns.
The NMA too, barged in on the rein of impunity in the system to call its members out on a nationwide strike despite the fact that it is only a professional association and not a registered industrial union. The idea of sacrificing innocent lives in the pursuit of purely industrial issues is both crass and selfish to put it mildly. Its insistence on the exclusive use of the title ‘consultant’ for the medical profession is also indefensible because the role of a consultant is clearly defined to cover all professional activities with the required expertise and experience.
We also believe that the retention or not of the job title of ‘Surgeon–General’ is purely an administrative issue that should not call for an industrial conflict. The role of the Surgeon-General has understandably been stated in the relevant statute and it should not be an issue that could generate rancour among the professionals in the health sector to the point of closing the sector down.
Perhaps the animus among the professionals in the health sector could be traced to the dominant condescending attitudes among them. These could be resolved by both training and counselling within the professional associations therein without even involving the office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) that is already too busy to pay the deserved attention to the details which a comprehensive resolution will require.
The industrial conflict which would call all doctors out in a nationwide strike is best avoided in order to prevent the consequent casualties of defenceless citizens who have been dying anyway, albeit not deliberately through other lapses that the country has been experiencing even when the services of the doctors were in full throttle.
We appeal for reason to prevail.
