DOCTORS ARE DYING AND SUFFERING AS A RESULT OF OVERWORK, ACCORDING TO THE CHAIRMAN OF UNIOSUN NARD

Dr. John Ojo, Chairman of the National Associations of Resident Doctors, NARD, Osun State Teaching Hospital, has criticized the work overload that doctors face on a daily basis in Nigeria.

He requested an increase in medical doctors' allowances and consolidated wages.

According to reports, Nigeria continues to lose hundreds of doctors each year due to brain drain.

Ojo revealed this on Wednesday when answering concerns about the health sector's issues. In Nigeria, on a current affairs radio broadcast in Osogbo.

Ojo further said that as a result of work-related stress, Nigerian doctors were dying, suffering, collapsing, and being medicated.

According to him, "The health sector is at the verge of collapse. In most teaching hospitals, where you are meant to have twenty doctors you just have two or three doctors working.

"By the recommendation of the World

Health Organisation, it is supposed to be one doctor to six hundred patients, but as we speak in the country, we have one doctor to ten thousand patients.

"So, for us to come up with those demands, we considered the economic situation of the country. The way NARD wanted it, the Nigerian Health Sector should be attractive to foreigners, not the other way round."

He bemoaned the brain drain among medical specialists, saying that if it was not stopped, it would have an impact on medical education.

"If you are saying that the younger ones should stay, who will train them?

"In the next ten years, if we continue at this level, I don't know what will happen to our country because the trainers are leaving, the younger ones are leaving.

"So who is going to be trained, who is going to train who?" He queried