Hospitals desolate as doctors’ strike bites

An indefinite strike by doctors entered its second week on Tuesday, taking a heavy toll on the country’s healthcare system, hospital sources said. Doctors, including consultants and general practitioners, grouped under the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) downed their tools on 28 May to protest the failure of the government to implement an agreement on improved conditions of service that was reached last year following similar industrial action. Reports from different parts of the country said most public hospitals were deserted and where skeleton services were available patients were overwhelming the few doctors on duty. “Most patients on admission have been prematurely discharged and those who remain have only nurses attending to them,” Uzochukwu Nweze, who has a fractured hand and is an out-patient at the Isolo General Hospital in Lagos, told IRIN. “There were only two doctors available today to attend to hundreds of out-patients who gathered there for treatment. Like so many others I had to leave without being able to see a doctor,” he added. Many patients with urgent health problems have been forced to seek attention in private medical establishments. These are too costly for the poor, who constitute at least 70 percent of the country’s 120 million people. Teaching hospitals attached to the country’s medical schools, among the few places where specialist health services are available in the country, have also been grounded by the strike. The NMA alleges that service conditions of state-employed medical practitioners have not been reviewed since 1991. The doctors and President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government reached agreement last year on new conditions of service after a three-month strike, but the doctors say the government has yet to implement the agreement. Minister of Health Alphonsus Nwosu told reporters last week that the action by the doctors was unnecessary. “The problem was that the NMA has made up its mind to embark on a strike to coincide with the second year of the Obasanjo administration and to embarrass the government. No amount of placation would have stopped the body,” he said. NMA President Dominic Osghae said on a radio phone-in programme on Monday his association was ready to negotiate with the government but was yet to be invited. “We want as much as anybody to end the suffering of Nigerians and we’re ready to negotiate any time the government indicates it is equally ready,” he said.