UCH NMA, Allied Healthcare workers’ crisis deepens





The face-off between medical doctors and Nigerian Union of Allied Healthcare Professionals at the University College Hospital, Ibadan, worsened yesterday, as the Nigerian Medical Association, NMA, declared that if laboratory technologists were allowed to coordinate medical laboratory science, it would amount to giving the work of a pilot to a carpenter.

Chairman of NMA in Oyo State, Professor Adefolarin Malomo, said this while speaking with newsmen at the NMA house in Ibadan.

The health professionals, comprising pharmacists, radiographers,  dieticians, medical laboratory technologists and physiotherapists, last week, gave a May 2 deadline to the Federal Government to intervene in the perceived marginalisation, failing which, activities in the teaching hospitals would be paralysed.

NMA said it had kept quiet all this while because it did not want to join issues with the allied workers.

The NMA said: “When the designation, medical laboratory technologist, was changed to medical laboratory scientist, in Nigeria, without retraining, we restrained ourselves from pointing out the embarrassing anomaly. Names can have some psychological effects, as it is turning out now. The world over, scientists become independent practitioners only after a minimum of PhD and internship through post doctoral fellowship.”

Advising them to go for programmes or positions they were clamouring for, Prof. Malomo said, “those of them who wish to practise science should go ahead brilliantly to undertake Masters’ and doctoral degrees, join universities where they can practise science and reach the peak of a science careers.

The professionals had called on President Goodluck Jonathan to take urgent steps that would prevent innocent patients from suffering in hospitals.

The National President of the health professionals,  Felix Faniran said they wanted to be appointed Chief Medical Director of UCH, and that Deputy Chief Medical Advisory Council on Energy, Special Duties, Dentistry, Laboratory and others should be scrapped.



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