* The headline is a classic display of unethical misleading, media mischief, misfit
By Yunusa Abubakar
MGMtimes has granted interview in response to the viral news reports culled from NAN that corps members replace strike doctors in FMC Yola, Adamu Muhammed Dodo is the Head of Information and media relations of the health facility. Below is his response:
What a headline, Corps members replace striking doctors in FMC Yola!
I laugh the uncritical thinking.
Note that the headline isn’t in tandem with the news report, they are really unrelated.
How can corps members, who are even less than 5 and without prior intensive varied medical experiences, replace over 100 striking professionals in a teaching hospital?
NAN has either been misquoted by or misled other media.
The headline could be either crafted out of media mischief against professional ethics or a classic exhibition of a misfit in the media practitioner and/or both.
The following is my response to the question asked by a NAN reporter on Tuesday in the office of the Head of Clinical Services and the position of the Medical Director when he was interviewed by AIT reporter on Thursday in the FMC Yola:
Hospital is a teamwork setting, strengthened by synergy between and among medical professionals and health workers.
Healthcare services are normally affected when any of the professional groups downs tools in a hospital setting as it will translate to constraint in a given service window.
The scenario is summarily the experience with the current nationwide industrial action embarked upon by the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD).
A Service window is affected, this has led to what you have observed as skeletal services being rendered in the hospital.
Note that NARD is only a category of medical doctors. Therefore, not all doctors in the hospital are on strike; there are doctors from the ranks of Principal Medical Officers (PMO) and above and the Consultants with some corps members, under strict supervision of senior doctors, trying as much as possible to attend to the patients on ground.
This is to say that the entire service windows are opened, you’ve seen it yourself; the admission wards, the Accident and Emergency Unit, the Emergency Paediatric Unit (EPU), the NHIS, the Labour Ward, Laboratories, the Intensive Care Unit and the surgical theatres among other service windows, this can be proven by the activities in our medical records service window.
It is only that the workloads are overwhelming on those who will also have to cover the duties of the striking doctors.
It isn’t true that the hospital is completely shut down as is being speculated. You’ve gone round, you’ve seen it yourself. End
Dodo further revealed that “in fact, not just my subordinates, I personally took most of the news reporters round the hospital, they have granted interviews to the non striking medical doctors, the patients who could talk and patient relatives in NHIS consulting rooms, at the wards and the EPU among other places.
“Doctors who were busy at the Theatres, the Labour Ward and Accident and Emergency service windows and could not be granted interviews were acknowledged.
“In the entire service windows visited by the AIT reporter, non of the doctors on ground were corps members”.
(MGMtimes)