Heads of Nigeria's medical establishment spent Tuesday monitoring compliance to a "total and indefinite" nationwide strike by medical doctors, while nurses and matrons took over care.

The strike has left nurses and matrons in charge of patients still in hospital, though doctors in plain clothes still visited critical patients under their care in wards before the strike was called Monday night.

Their presence, loitering in empty hospital corridors, are allowed under "essential duty" designation, though they officially on strike.

At district hospitals in Maitama and Wuse, the strike was so complete doctors hung around idly and even officials monitoring compliance would not comment.

Priscilla Edoh showed up for her antenatal clinic appointment at National Hospital, Abuja but no doctor would see her, despite her four-hour wait.

"We were told to wait. Up till now they didn't come," the pregnant woman said, alone in a waiting room that had emptied since morning.

"Nobody else can attend to us. What can we do? In the last strike, the consultants attended to us, and that was okay. But today, nobody, just the matron and nurses, and what can they do? They can only teach us. The people that need to do the actual checkup are the doctors."

A lawyer, who declined to be named, said his friend's wife was "forcefully discharged" at the hospital, three days after giving birth through Caesarean section.

As professionals, we are "trained to be diligent, humane, irrespective of your grievances," he lamented.

"They just brought in a patient who had almost died and there was nobody to attend to him. Is that how inhuman we have become?"

But Nigerian Medical Association insisted on Monday that its industrial action, which comes six months after a previous threat of strike was suspended on January 5, will continue indefinitely.

It rules out a hundred-percent agreement to all its demands but said only a government circular agreeing to "minimum endpoints"--grounds it is willing to yield on 24 key issues--will end the strike.