Wheres The Truth In Foreign-Trained Doctors and MDCNs Fight?
In case you missed it. Last November, a total of 680 doctors who got their medical trainings in countries such as China, UK, US, Egypt, Russia, Ukraine and the Caribbean, sat for the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria’s (MDCN) qualification examination for a license to practice in Nigeria, but only 240 passed while 440 of them failed according to the MDCN.
But the affected 440 doctors will take none of that. They claimed the MDCN produced examination questions that were out of sync with the curriculum, had no standardised syllabus and ran with a poor marking scheme amongst other shortcomings levelled against the examiner.
Therefore, the doctors along with their parents led a march to the Nigerian senate to press home their grievances and demand justice.
Meanwhile, MDCN on its part has denounced all the allegations by the doctors. The regulatory body states that the foreign-based doctors just couldn’t pass the standards of its qualification tests which it said was the reason behind the massive failure.
As such, the senate, which the distraught doctors took their matter to, mandated its committee on health to look into the matter with a view to ascertaining the facts of the accusations and counter-accusations from the doctors and the MDCN. But nothing has come out of this yet.
But frankly this critical matter shouldn’t just be treated by just the mere committee “look” that usually glances over many issues of national importance such as the case at hand.
Really, the presidency should rise up to this situation in order to reveal the truth of the matter. Nigeria currently doesn’t have enough doctors to sufficiently cater to the health needs across the country.
Therefore the government needs to double its efforts in improving infrastructure and human resources in the health sector. And this should be done essentially with a vision to increase the size of home-grown doctors, strengthen learning and regulatory capacity in the sector and boost the confidence of any certified foreign-trained doctor on the structure in place.
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