Young Nigerian Doctor Cries Out To Nigerian Govt ''Please Save Our Profession''

This is so sad!!!!

This is my story......

 I am a 25-year old doctor who graduated in July last year from a foreign country. Despite many warnings from different people not to bother coming back to Nigeria but rather to seek greener pastures somewhere else. 

From our predecessors, we had heard of how difficult it was just to get a place for internship/housemanship. This housemanship is a compulsory one-year program that every doctor is supposed to undergo before they are even allowed to do their NYSC and then become a full-time doctor.

 According to schedule, this is what the plan is supposed to be for a foreign graduate like me. Graduate medical school after 6 years come back to Nigeria write the licensing exam to enable you practice do your NYSC and then go from there. I finished my 6years without a hitch, came out 5th in my whole set out of over 300 people. I came back to Nigeria to write the licensing exam that took place in November 2017 and out of almost 700 doctors, only about 243 passed (this made the news on many blogs and even some newspapers).

 I was fortunate to be among those 243 people, you can imagine my excitement that I just have to write this exam once. The next step should be internship right? After getting inducted in February 2018 (3 months later), the search for a place to do internship has been extremely difficult, excruciating and depressing.


Let us say I know 40 people personally who passed that exam, only about 15 have gotten a place 6 MONTHS LATER! (Some by merit and some by connections in high places). That means I should have 6 months left if I had started immediately but as it is, I don’t even know when my one-year cycle is going to begin. You need connections for almost everything, there are people who are working that didn’t even take the exams but connection helped them and truth be told, I wish I had that connection but I don’t. 

To cut the long story short, the government is aware of this complaint and in the early months of 2017, they said by 2018 (almost 8 months gone) they are going to start posting people immediately after they have received their license (just like NYSC). 2018 is almost gone and nothing is happening and we wonder why out of every 10 doctors you meet, 8 are planning to leave the country.

 IT IS ONLY IN NIGERIA THAT A SIMPLE PROCESS HAS TURNED INTO PRAYER AND FASTING. 

I have a friend who went to the UK immediately after school, she has passed her exams and has already started her housemanship. I also have a friend from Namibia who got her housemanship posting the same time the exam pass list was out.

Please Stella, help us remind our government that there are competent doctors who are stranded and waiting for a change to happen. I know some people who after waiting for more than a year have decided to go and do the one-year cycle for free. Imagine collecting transport money and other allowances from your parents for another year after they suffered to train you for 6 years.

 PLEASE THIS IS AN OUTCRY FROM THE VOICELESS WHO ARE STUCK AND HAVE NO PLACE TO TURN TO.

 Please Nigerian government do something for the health sector, many of us are already discouraged at just the beginning level. I have stopped reading my books and now looking for other ways to get money while I wait. 

PLEASE TURN OUT PRAYER POINTS INTO GOVERNMENT LAWS AS YOU ALREADY PROMISED. 

It might not benefit me but I would never pray for the next set coming to go through what I am going through. This applies to both home trained and foreign doctors. 

APPROPRIATE AUTHORITIES PLEASE DO SOMETHING AS FRUSTRATION HAS BECOME OUR DAILY BREAD AND THE LIGHT OF HOPE GETS DIMMER EVERYDAY. 

we are losing time that can never be recovered. Thank you very much in advance.

Written by a frustrated young Nigerian Doctor