FG clears employment hurdles in health institutions

The Federal Government has cleared the hurdles in the ways of the employment of Health workers in the country to address the incident of the depleting medical officers migrating from the country.

Consequently, a government committee has been constituted to address the matter of accumulated waiver requests for employment of health workers in hospitals nationwide.

Minister of State for Health, Tunji Alausa, who made this known when he paid a familiarisation visit to the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Oyo State, said as soon as the Ministry verified the employment list of the health institution, there won’t be any barrier for the institution to carry out the employment.

In a statement released on Friday by the Director of Information, Patricia Deworitshe, the Minister, during oversight visits to evaluate federally-owned health institutions in the country, highlighted the significant concern of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu regarding the shortage of human resources for health.

Alausa said that with the challenge of shortage of human resources for health faced in the country, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR in his magnanimity saw the need for the process of waivers to recruit healthcare workers to be more streamlined and simplified and that was why the approval of the issuance of waivers request for hospitals is now domiciled at the Federal Ministry of Health.

“This is due to some bottlenecks faced by our Chief Medical and Medical Directors, in the process of getting waiver approvals.

“We reached out to the Head of Service of the Federation (HOSF), Dr. Yemi Esan, who has been on top, working judiciously to get these approvals, but we just all decided that it will be easier if the waiver process starts from the Ministry.

So going forward from January, we are setting up a waiver committee at the Ministry that will promptly review and address all waiver requests from all our hospitals”, Alausa was quoted as saying.

He assured of accountability and transparency in the process, while emphasing that each hospital would generate a request for the number of staff needed to the Ministry, which will then go to the HOSF for some checks and balances under the establishment law, to see what’s budgeted for the year.

The Minister commended UCH for the various feats achieved in healthcare delivery, especially in the area of training, but said there is a need to train more to meet our future needs.

Prof. Jesse Otegbayo, Chief Medical Director of UCH, highlighted some of the challenges faced as well as achievements, which include specialised surgical procedures in partnership with some UK-based charities and other organisations as well as donations of equipment and infrastructures by well-meaning Nigerians.

He said one of the ambitions of the UCH is to move to a quaternary level of care like some hospitals in the developed world. The UCH, Ibadan at inception in 1948 before the Act of British Parliament had two Clinical Departments (Medical and Surgery) but now has 85 departments, 6 Units and 2 Divisions.