FORMER Chief Medical Director (CMD), University College Hospital (UCH), Professor Temitope Alonge, has expressed fears about the availability of senior doctors to teach and mentor junior doctors in the years to come, due to disparities in pay and job schedules of doctors employed as consultants by the Federal Ministry of Health and Education across the tertiary health sector.
Professor Alonge, in an interview with the Nigerian Tribune, said the disparity in salaries could cause Nigeria to end up with more part-time lecturers in the medical field, because the salaries paid to doctors who are both lecturers and consultants in the teaching hospital are not commensurate with those of their contemporaries, who are hospital consultants.
“What is even worse is that a lot of the hospital consultants earn more than the professors who trained them, sometimes half a million naira short.
“But here as a lecturer and honorary consultant, you are doing a double job; you are teaching medical students and resident doctors, including taking them to the operating theatre to show them what you are doing as well as offering clinical services, but at the end of the day, your pay is far less.
“But the hospital consultant provides clinical services, which you also provide as a so-called honorary consultant. They are not obligated to teach. The name honorary consultant is a misnomer, that is what the government has capitalised on to say that our services as honorary consultants can be discarded.
“That mindset made it easy for the government to hide under the name of an honorary consultant, though a consultant is a consultant, and if one chooses to come in to do academic work, which is extra work, one expects to probably get more money.
“But that is not the case; as such, many younger consultants don’t want to be lecturer consultants but hospital consultants. That means over time, we may end up having predominantly hospital consultants and nobody to take over the responsibility of teaching and research,” he said.
Professor Alonge said having predominantly hospital consultants could spell a problem for doctors’ training in Nigeria in the future, since they are not obligated to teach.
On the Federal Government’s proposal to reabsorb retired doctors on a contract basis, he said the government should reconsider the terms for the reengagement, to ensure more people are favourably disposed to accepting to come back to serve.
“If I decide that I want to leave and you are asking me to come back, I can dictate my terms. Beyond dictating my terms, you should offer me what will attract me to stay, not say that you will pay me what I was earning before retirement,” he stated.
On the emigration of doctors, Professor Alonge said most of those who emigrated are into specialties that sell outside Nigeria, adding that part of measures to reverse the brain drain should include a revisit on differential call duty allowances for doctors based on the work demands of each specialty.
READ ALSO FROM NIGERIAN TRIBUNE
and then