For many months now I have sat down, in a holy attempt to understand the the difference between slave trade and medical practice in sub-sahara West Africa.

 

What is our crime? That we were the most brilliant set of beings to grace planet Earth?

 

Let me rewind....

 

I came out of academy not just as the best of my kind but a state icon and a mathematics consultant (I still wonder why some people fail mathematics🤷♀) but when I entered med school....I discovered I was just one of them and not the only one. A time came, I was missing between the sands of intellectual waterfalls and the need to delineate a nitch for myself....I could not even auscultate enough passion to enjoy the training. The desire to save the dying man continued to fall in aliquots. Finally MBBS became a percussable piece of property....but las las, it was a piece of paper for many who were dying to leave the system🤷♀

 

Now, let me take a correct tangent in my bid to project the congenital woes of a black doctor in a black land....where do I start?

 

Guess what? In my attempt to clerk this moribund patient, one thing strucked me.....the diagnosis is not good, the prognosis is not good and everyone is shouting... "continue management"

 

A doctor spent 7years in medical school studying the pathology and appropriate theurapeutics in helping to settle the dilemma of the health-debtors! We were trained as disease detectives and illness prosecutors armed by Hippocratic principles and practices.....but guess what? I met a system which was probably designed by one crazy individual who has no life outside the corridors of the hospital🤐

 

One, the average doctor in Nigeria works for about 300hrs a month! 

 

You don't believe abi?

 

You come to work by 7am, leave after 5pm....somewhere like paediatrics, na 8pm if you are so lucky that you don't have system failure.

 

As if that was not enough punishment, we now created a midnight punishment for ourselves called call! That arrangement is  life-shortening!

 

Let me make a comparative analysis:

Nurses run shift. What does it mean? They have 3set of workers. The first set work from 8am-2pm(6hrs), the 2nd set work from 2pm-8pm(6hrs), the 3rd set work from 8pm till morning!(12hrs), And they always come in minimum of 2 nurses per ward, so that they can take turns to sleep during the night shift. Those on night shifts for one week will go for off for the next one week. Off means that they won't come to work within one full week! That is work for half of one week, sleep for one week.

We don't run shifts, we take calls.... meaning, you come to work by 7am to do pre-rounds, run the day's work till 4pm, then start the call from 4pm till 8am the next day and God help you, you may be the only one handling both the ward and emergency....if you are a sinner man, a bad case will just hit your station at 7.45am, meaning, you won't bath that day as you must join post-call review by 8am till 9am then start rounds and continue with Secretariat duties till God knows when. In the facility where I found myself, we will now start post-rounds, after which you will start documentation.....but this is just child's play.....34hrs non-stop is expected!

 

In the department I find myself, calls is not enough, you also have the dreaded weekend calls that runs for 48hrs... Saturday morning till Monday morning......and when you want to talk, the elders who have gone ahead will say, we did it too, you are not the first 🤷♀and I begin to question the rationale of perpetuating slavery.....simply because somebody pushed you through it, does it mean somebody coming after you must suffer it too? Is that not a moribund vicious cycle of slavery!

 

Two, we were using folder jejeli and was saying that the system was not efficient, the hospital management of many hospitals now complained that files were missing....instead of defending our fort, our fathers accepted that we will not only document during rounds but must sit and type it into the system.....hence we were made typist by force by fire.

 

Can I shock you? The attendants in the hospital was employed primarily to assist the nurse and not you....so she owes the white garment girls more of her loyalty. So who is employed to assist the doctor? Please don't say the nurse

 

The Nightingale girls may have been employed to assist the doctors by nursing....but is that what is obtainable?

 

They went to University for 5years, they passed mathematics, yet after writing prescription, you need to still update treatment sheet. Haba, here you have to calculate the dosages as if you are talking to a learning preterm! You need to explain in details how the drugs should be given! All transactions entered by our fathers to allow peace reign within the hospital facility.

These babes don't set IV lines, don't do this and that, with a list of don't see that is longer than Imo state bride price list, common line they won't even set.....yet they can tissue lines like tissue paper. After they tissue it, they will send their house girls to bring you a note to come and call you by 2am in the middle of an emergency.....and your chief will command you out of transferred aggression to go and set the line within 5mins and be back! Chai, who did this to us?

 

If our tale of many woes ended with nurses, I won't be worried....now patients relatives have joined the train, and the all-doing doctor must become!

 

You hear statements like: follow that PCV, I don't care how you do it, but get it! So you start chasing shadows....simply because our fathers could not face patients relatives and tell them to do the needful.

 

Now we do urgent PCV, micro-ESR, RDT, ARV testing, even the  phlebotomist paid to take blood samples expect us to collect blood samples and label it correctly before sending it to their labs? So I ask, what are they being paid for?

 

Everymorning, we take the vitals of each of our patients ...so tell me,  what exactly is the nurse nursing?

 

I entered a department where doctors run alternate day's call! It is terrible......yet see the staggering statistics👇

 

The nurses earn more than 2/3rd of your salary and she is still clamouring for more, yet she is not carrying up to a tenth of your workload!

 

You know why? For every doctor employed, 3nurses are expected to be employed....yet, you will be doing consultant ward rounds and they will be sitting on their table gisting.

 

Every other worker in the hospital is clamouring for more pay while the doctor is clamouring for more work....is this a curse?

 

Las Las our greatest undoing is that we know too much and work is our surname.

Las Las our biggest sin is that our fathers have gone through it and so we must pass through it....stress is not just part of the calling but an inheritance that we must embrace.

 

But can you see the Exodus of trained doctors via USMLE/PLAB pores out of this rabbit hole? Our government spend so much to train medical doctors in this country but other nations are not just reaping off them courtesy of palpable foolishness but this white boys are subjecting us to hard exams in order to come and serve them....simply because the black man just love being black.

 

Dont get me wrong, though the white man seeks to make life easy, their own medical practice is a near disaster like ours.....courtsey of the system but not this bad. They invent toys to do most of the work and guess what? Full robots are en-route. 

 

Only in Africa that a house officer will be turned into a monitoring machine....to measure vitals including BP every 15mins and RBG every 30mins while blood is given in 5mls aliquout every 25mins over 5hours.

 

May God forgive who created this slavery.......

 

As a closing remark, I beg us that are going deep into this discipline..... let's change this madness.

 

An average doctor already has a lifespan lower than that of an  average policeman. How come the custodian of health cannot keep their own commandments.

 

O physiscian heal thyself, you are bleeding to death.

 

This is the Voice of one crying in the Wilderness saying: This system needs to be changed.......

 

So I ask, who designed this system?

 

©Atox