Health Sector Rivalry: All healthcare professionals are a single entity, UCH CMD

Chief Medical Director, University College Hospital, Ibadan, Professor Jesse Otegbayo has advocated that all healthcare professional groups work together for quality patient care, saying all healthcare professionals are a single entity.

Otegbayo was responding to questions on unhealthy interprofessional rivalry in the healthcare sector on the sidelines of the 2019 International Nurses’ Week of the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives (NANNM), UCH, Branch. The theme was ‘Nurses: A Voice to Lead, Health for All’.

He said: “Nurses are the largest workforce in healthcare services and their services are so unique and crucial to healthcare delivery because they are the closest to the patients, they see their waking moments, so don’t joke with our nurses.

“The institution under this administration recognises the importance of all the professions in providing quality patient care and we are a single entity and that is the message we promote as an administration.

“To foster a healthy relationship, the hospital organises programmes and activities involving all the professional groups for not only academic and professional interactions, but also social interactions and when we all work together as one, it will positively affect patient care and give us job satisfaction,” he said.

Otegbayo then urged the nurses to be committed to their responsibility as “guardians of patients”.

“We are appealing to the nurses not see the patients as just a number or mere names but as humans who have been placed in their care by God. All nurses should believe that what they are doing is a calling because they work with the highest creation of God,” he said.

In his address, the key speaker, Prof Joseph Aina, called on the Federal Government to include all healthcare professional groups in leadership position and tertiary hospital management.

Aina, a professor of nursing at Babcock University, Ilishan-Remo, said that having greater involvement of all groups in decision making and healthcare governance would solve the problem of rivalry and also improve healthcare delivery.

“For every Nigeria to have access to good quality healthcare we must include every healthcare professional group in leadership.

“When nurses have a seat at the table and a voice in decision making we can find lasting solutions to the many the crisis bedevilling the health sector,” he said.

Mrs Ronke Bello, the Chairman, NANNM UCH Chapter, said that quackery in the nation’s health sector had become a menace negatively affecting guaranteed health for all citizens.

Bello called on the government to address the problem of overworked nurses in public health institutions as well as develop a policy to reduce the impact of quackery to the barest minimum.

According to her, “While the recommended nurse-patient ratio is 1:2, the existing structure in the country puts the ratio at 1:10 and above in many institutions. The ugly situation has made many nurses develop job-related health complications which sometimes lead to permanent disabilities.”