MDCAN asks Jonathan to reverse residentdoctors’ suspension

The Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria on Thursday warned that the suspension of the Residency Training Programme in Federal Government Hospitals posed grave consequences in the delivery of specialist healthcare services in the country.The group which met in Abuja to deliberate on the suspension of the programme said areas like special care baby units, neurosurgery, cardiothoracic surgery, oncology and other specialties, would be most affected by the development. The MDCAN in a statement signed by its President, Dr Steven Oluwole, after the meeting, also warned that that “the suspension, if allowed to continue will interrupt the on-going training and production of specialists, likely to take another 10 years to achieve, in the event of the eventual suspension the programme.”The statement said, “The MDCAN strongly recommends that Mr President suspends further development and continuation of mechanism, arrangement, and surport that have been put in place to drive or to execute this project which we predict will spell doom for tertiary health care delivery in Nigeria.“It is not clear to the MDCAN how Mr President intends to recruit trainees into the Programme; It is not clear how Junior and Senior Residents will be produced at the take off of the Programme, or perhaps we will wait for the next five to 10 years to produce the first batch of senior residents.“It is not clear how the special care baby units, neurosurgery, cardiothoracic surgery, oncology and other specialities will be recreated to produce tertiary level care if this programme takes off.“This suspension, which truncates more than four decades of investments in medical training, presents a future too bleak to contemplate” The MDCAN regretted that as Medical Consultants and trainers of Resident Doctors, its members were not consulted before announcing the suspension.It said, “Members of the MDCAN, who are the trainers of the resident doctors, were not consulted before taking a decision of this monumental magnitude.“The residency training programme is designed to produce specialists in all fields of the practice of medicine. Although the programme commenced in Nigeria over 40 years ago, it is still being developed, and remodeled” The group also described as aberration, the situation in which the President is the defacto Director of Residency.MDCAN added that it was not aware of any country in the history of residency training where the Director of Residency Training is the Head of State.