Medical association to write Buhari over kidnapping of doctors

The Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) is to officially write the presidency with complaints about “security risks doctors are facing nationwide while discharging their duties”.

National executives of the association met in Makurdi and reached a resolution to raise an awareness about growing spate of insecurity and kidnappings, targeting doctors in particular.

NMA president, Dr Francis Faduyile, said the association is to publish a record of kidnappings targeting doctors in the last two years nationwide.

In the period, four doctors had been kidnapped in Benue, four more in Cross River, six in Ondo, and two each in Imo and Taraba, he said, noting that they were targeted.

“We want to officially write to the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to showcase how kidnappers are looking at doctors, and this will hamper our work, if we make doctors apprehensive of going to work,” Faduyile said.

“Many of them do not look random. They look as if they actually went for them. Unfortunately, ransom is paid.”

In the latest incident, armed men, who abducted the chief medical director of Irrua Specialist Teaching Hospital, Dr Sylvanus Okogbeni, killed two security officers attached to him. He was later freed.

“These are things that doctors are not happy about. We have to be able to control ourselves not to take a very drastic action against the government of the nation,” he said.

Other resolutions reached by the executives included a call on the public, judiciary, military and paramilitary to insist on a doctor’s stamp on medical reports and certificates.

The stamp is customized with biometric data that identifies individual doctors, and NMA said it is guaranteed to check quacks.

Another resolution called on Abia State government to pay salaries of doctors and other health workers denied pay for months. It said failure to pay was “highly provocative” and against the tenets of civil service rules and natural justice.

One resolution called on government to increase budgetary allocation to health, seek alternative platforms of financing healthcare and commit to proper use of the available funds.