Why is it that we Nigerians like shortcuts?

 

Somebody who could not gain admission to study medicine and surgery now wants to not only be like medical doctors but to also lead the doctors. I got admission to study one of the paramedical courses but when I saw the central role of a medical doctor in the management of patients and I was not ready to play a second fiddle to anybody,I spent good four years of my productive years in the paramedical course before changing over to medicine. There are stories here and there of how people finished their first degrees,served out their NYSC years and applied through direct entry to study medicine. In fact in my class,my best friend, who had a first degree  in medical laboratory science,painfully failed out in our second MBBS  examination. He was not deterred,he collected his transcript and moved on to another school. 

 

The paradox there was that he became a doctor before many of our classmates,those were the vagaries of life. Also,my own roommate,popularly called master,who is now a resident doctor at Federal Teaching Hospital,Abakaliki,finished his first degree,served out his NYSC years,worked for few years and later returned to school to run a master's programme. He was a demonstrator in one of our first year practical courses. While still in the programme,he applied to study medicine through direct entry and when he got the admission,he consulted many people,even his own supervisor advised him to suspend his master's programme to pursue the medicine. My roommate passed through the pains of being in the same class with 'little kids' that he taught barely one year  and who saw him as demi-god then. The funny thing there was that he was not doing better in terms of academic performance than the 'little kids' he once taught. In fact,he was not among the first hundred brilliant students in the class but he persevered and today he has fulfilled his life ambition. No wonder,one of the former ministers of education during Chief Olusegun Obasanjo regime once proposed that medicine and surgery should be studied as a second degree course in  Nigeria,though the proposal was later abandoned,just like any other Nigerian projects/policies, by the successive administration.

 

Many people are calling for peace to return to the health sector while the underlying problems are not first nipped in the bud. It is like requesting to make a peace with a man while at the same time asking the same man to prepare a timetable for how you will be sharing his wife with him. As psychologists will always say that-peace is not the absence of war but the presence of justice-there is no way you can sit on my nose and get balanced. In the actual sense of it,the doctors are the ones that have been at the receiving end. In the private hospitals,if a doctor makes a mistake and sends a patient out to a medical laboratory scientist to run a test and come back,that is a farewell to that patient as the medical laboratory scientist after the test will interpret the result and  will still go further to prescribe drugs to the patient-thanks to broad spectrum drugs.Drug interactions along with other pharmacodynamic and pharnacokinetic properties of drugs are not taken care of hence the emergence of  drug resistance and the high rate of kidney failures among patients(I do not want to talk about all these herbal mixtures with NAFDAC registration numbers-may be that should be covered in my subsequent write-ups).

 

In some areas,some pharmacy shops are in symbiotic relationship with some medical laboratory firms. When a patient comes to a pharmacy shop,whoever is there refers the patient to the laboratory firm and after the test,the patient is sent back to the pharmacist for prescription and vice versa. I don't need to call names but if at all we have functional regulatory agencies,they can verify my claims as pharmacy shops are now giving intravenous drugs and still go on to  manage diarrhoeal diseases of children with anti-motility drugs ,just to mention but a few.

 

Traditional-birth- attendants and midwives are now 'medical' directors in their 'registered' maternity homes,they only refer out their patients when the whole situation gets complicated,most of which the patients will die on the road before reaching the nearest hospital. Was it not my auntie that was advised by a consultant gynaecologist last year that her pregnancy would end with caesarean section(cs) since the first was by cs? Thereafter,my auntie was convinced by her pastor that she would deliver normally if she delivered in one of their members' maternity,who knows if the pastor gets any commission for each referral.The summary is that,that my auntie is no longer in the land of the living today courtesy of the trial of labour in a pregnant woman who became pregnant less than one year of the previous delivery by cs and who presented with the same conditions that led to the first Cs. I decided not to go into any litigation because I warned  both my auntie and the husband but they attached more importance to the prophetic declaration by  their pastor. 

 

Why is it that the regulatory agency that accredits a pharmacy shop will  not approve a pharmacy shop if it is discovered that the said shop is owned by a medical doctor or that it is in the same compound with a hospital even if the shop has satisfied all the requirements including employing pharmacists?Anybody who is not happy with the central role of doctors in the health sector should simply pick up JAMB forms-either UTME or direct entry-to come and see what we saw,may be after passing through the difficulties of the course,the person will now advocate that doctors should be pushed to the corner while the JOHESU members who study their courses semester by semester with no difficulty will then become the leaders of the health sector .Nelson Mandela did a similar thing by picking a law form and studied law while in the prison in order to further his fight against the apartheid regime in his country.

    

In view of the above,I think if the government can neither disband JOHESU nor make doctors integral part of it,and cannot allow JOHESU to proceed on their proposed indefinite industrial action while salary packages and well fare of doctors are improved,then the only option left is to establish parallel JOHESU hospitals and possibly create another federal ministry just like ministry of Niger delta. The name may be federal ministry of JOHESU.I am very sure that such an establishment will not survive more than a year and it is then  that people will understand that JOHESU is an amorphous body like a keg of gunpowder waiting to explode. 

 

The the non-medical staff in JOHESU will realise that all these years,medical staff  part of JOHESU have just used them in achieving their ulterior motive which is primarily to fight doctors. The porters,the cleaners,ward-maids,mortuary-attendants etc will realise that they have been used by their more educated JOHESU members and that they have more differences than similarities for them to have existed together as a group.

 

It is akin to what happened in one of George Owen's novels,the Animal farm,where Napoleon after leading other animals to overthrow the owner of the manor farm,later turned out to be the worst ruler ever known .  If they care to learn from history,they will know what radiographers passed through in 2012 over the change of name of their regulatory body. It was then that the Bsc holders saw the HND holders as junior and inferior colleagues. 

 

A word, they say,is enough for the wise.

 

By DR PAUL JOHN

[email protected]

08083658038

 

*CLICK HERE FOR PART 1 OF THIS WRITE UP