*Pharmacists meet FG today over welfare, industrial action

*Demand implementation of nine-point agreement 

 

THE World Health Organization (WHO) has castigated the pharmaceutical industry for failing to develop a vaccine for Ebola over the some 40 years that the virus has threatened West Africa. Director General of the WHO, Margaret Chan, speaking in Cotonou, Benin, wondered rhetorically why clinicians are “still empty-handed, with no vaccines and no cure” for Ebola, even though the disease first appeared some four decades ago.

 

The answer, said Chan, is at least in part that “Ebola has historically been confined to poor African nations.” She lambasted drug manufacturers for not taking an interest in an Ebola vaccine until the disease became a threat to non-African countries, including the U.S. “The Research and Development (R&D) incentive is virtually nonexistent,” she continued. “A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay.”

 

Meanwhile, the pharmacists under the aegis of Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria (PSN) are set to meet the Federal Government (FG) team today over their welfare and the ongoing strike by its members and the umbrella union, NUAHP. NUAHP has been on strike since October 15, 2014, to protest non-implementation of agreements reached with the federal government in January 2014 and the ruling of the Industrial Court in July 2014.

 

President PSN, Olumide Akintayo, yesterday, in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State, at the opening ceremony of the 87th Annual National Conference of the Society tagged  “Ibom 2014” said faulted the federal government delaying the implementation of the agreement reached with the Society and NUAHP. The PSN proposed that a meeting with the federal government should hold on Thursday November 6, 2014 and demanded that government come up with circulars in tandem with memorandum of understandings already signed with JOHESU in the following areas:

 

*Non-promotion of its members from salary Consolidated Health Salary Scale (CONHESS) 14-15 as directors having stayed for four to 15 years on the same salary level without promotion in most Federal Tertiary Hospitals. 

*Immediate release of circular on adjustment of salary since January 2014 and immediate payment of at least two months arrears while the remaining is paid after being accommodated in the 2015 budget. 

*Immediate release of the circular on extension of retirement age to be back dated to February 2014 when the issue was presented to National Council on establishment. 

*Immediate and full payment of arrears of salaries of CONHESS 10 skipping outstanding since the year 2010.

*Immediate amendment of the circular on consultancy status as pronounced by National Industrial Court on 22nd July, 2013, and agreed to at a meeting of 12th August, 2014, with the Federal Government. 

*Payment of arrears of specialist allowance to qualified hospital based professionals with effect from 1st January 2010 in line with National Industrial Court of Nigeria (NICN) ruling. 

*Minimizing the lopsidedness in the membership of Boards of Management of Tertiary Hospitals. 

*Need to define the functions and power of honourary consultants in Teaching Hospitals and the need to appoint more hospital based consultants instead of Honourary Consultants. 

*Need for residency programme for all health professionals. 

*Issuance of guidelines on appointment of Chairman, Medical Advisory Committee and the committee’s composition. 

*Need for complete autonomy for the Teaching Hospitals by removing University lecturers as heads in some of the clinical departments. 

*Restoration of working days as annual leave. 

 

Akintayo said: “I wish to put on record that eight months after we commenced a robust attempt to redress the unfortunate status quo in healthcare in Nigeria, we are still left in the cold. Government as a matter of fact has traded off salient MOUs it signed with us in a bid to placate doctors when they embarked on their unlawful and illegal strike for seven weeks between July and August. “We note with serious concern that Government in continuation of its delay tactics has yet again come up with excuses including a need to allow the fresh supervising Minister of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity to familiarize with the various welfare issues being canvassed by PSN/JOHESU for over eight months now.

 

“Our presumption remains that government is a continuum and in the light of such the relevant bureaucrats in the Federal Ministry of Labour and Productivity ordinarily do not need a whooping three and half weeks to adequately brief the newly appointed supervising Minister.

 

“It is imperative to again draw the attention of government to the increasing entropy the levity with which it has treated the welfare of over 95 per cent of the health workforce continues to generate. While we continue to solicit the patience of our members who have become extremely restive as demonstrated when one of the unions in the health sector made attempts to embark on a strike recently, the JOHESU will not continue to wait eternally and allow government to trample on the rights as well as privileges of its members. Perhaps we should put on record, the seeming government ineptitude to make any meaningful progress on our demands for about one year now has exposed us to ridicule and insult from the rank and file of our members. In some extreme situation outright blackmail is employed as a tool as in some strange instances the leadership is accused of compromise with the federal government.”

 

Akintayo said PSN will align totally with the decisions of JOHESU to chart a way forward after this current dialogue. 

 

Meanwhile, Chan also reiterated that the West African outbreak has been so severe because her organization’s calls for advanced investment in the region’s underdeveloped health system have gone unheeded. So, the three hard-hit countries had scant public-health infrastructure that was bound to buckle when confronted by an infectious disease, she said.

 

“Two WHO arguments that have fallen on deaf ears for decades are now out there with consequences that all the world can see, every day, on prime-time TV news,” said Chan.

 

The Ebola virus was discovered in 1976 in what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo), killing more than 400 people both there and in Sudan. Similar outbreaks in the 1990s and early 2000s also killed hundreds of people in Congo and Uganda. In the most recent outbreak, which has killed at least 4,951 people, almost all of the some 13,567 Ebola cases have been in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The U.S. has confirmed four cases of the virus, while Spain has confirmed one case.

 

The WHO has said it plans to begin treating health care workers in the three most affected countries with an experimental vaccine in the first quarter of 2015.

 

By Chukwuma Muanya

Guardian