Nigerian nurses want “state of emergency” declared in health sector

In an effort to sanitise the country’s health sector, the National Association of Nigerian Nurses and Midwives (NANNM) has pleaded with the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency to save it from collapse.
Mr Wale Olatunde, Chairman, NANNM Public Health Institutions Sector, made the call on Wednesday at the on-going annual labour workshop in Abuja with the theme, “Harmonious Trade Dispute Resolution: A Panacea for Healthy Industrial Relationship”.
Olatunde said that such measure would purge the sector of inefficiency and corruption.
He said there was need to liberate the administration of healthcare from doctors, who, he claimed, were ruining the public health institutions “through privatisation.”
He urged the Federal Government to ensure full and urgent implementation of the terms of agreement it entered into with the Joint Health Sector Union (JOHESU) on Sept. 30, 2017.
Olatunde said that urgent implementation of the said agreement would save Nigerians further pains and untimely death.
According to him, the agreement was supposed to have been fully implemented five weeks after but almost seven months after, nothing had been done.
He claimed that medical doctors were deliberately ruining the health sector and ensuring industrial disharmony for pecuniary gains.
“This is to promote their private practices that are often the beneficiaries of industrial crisis in the health sector.
“By so doing they make the vast majority of poor Nigerians who cannot afford their private facilities to suffer and die unnecessarily.
“Their allegiance and loyalty is more to their medical profession than to the good people of this country.
“Countries with best health indices within and outside Africa do not leave the administration of the healthcare system in the hands of medical doctors as a birth-right.
“They rather depend on the best hands from within and outside the health sector,” Olatunde said.
He said the workshop was aimed at exposing the union’s executives at the national and the local levels to the rudiments of trade union practice for efficiency.