MDCAN urges JOHESU, others to accept Yayale committee report 

CONCERNED about the objections to implement certain aspects of the Yayale Ahmed Presidential Committee of Experts on Professional Relationships in the Public sector, the Medical and Dental Consultants Association of Nigeria (MDCAN), has urged health workers to have a rethink.

 MDCAN said the report, if implemented, would bring relative peace to the health sector.

 President of the Association, Steven Oluwole, particularly tasked the Joint Health Sector Unions (JOHESU) to put aside its reservations about some of the recommendations as posited in the document and work with doctors to ensure harmony in the sector.

Oduwole said MDCAN was available to parley with JOHESU to achieve peaceful and healthy professional co-existence in the hospitals.

 A statement from MDCAN reads: “The Yayale Ahmed Committee was set up to identify the causes of the acrimony among public health workers and recommend measures that will assist the government in ensuring a harmonious work relationship among the various categories of Public Health workers in the best interest of the citizens.

 “Unfortunately JOHESU, the Joint Health Sector Unions, is again playing the victim strategy to disparage the Committee members and cast doubts on their impartiality.”

Oduwole noted how JOHESU had allegedly endorsed the composition of the Yayale Ahmed Committee, which had approximately 20% medical doctor members.

He tasked JOHESU to “Seek enhancement of remuneration for its members through legitimate labour law processes rather than usurpation of roles and assumptions of titular positions that will distort the command structure of the health services; accept their defined roles in the hospitals as practised in Health Institutions visited by Yayale Ahmed Committee; encourage their members in the Laboratory Services to work under the leadership of medical doctors as recommended by Yayale Ahmed Committee.”

 He also asked JOHESU to “encourage their members in the Laboratory Services to work under the leadership of medical doctors as recommended by Yayale Ahmed Committee; withdraw court cases that Yayale Ahmed findings have rendered obsolete; stop all acts of hooliganism and vandalism.”

 In a protest to the report by Yayale Ahmed Presidential Committee of Experts on Professional Relationships in the Public sector, JOHESU and its allied groups had urged President Goodluck Jonathan to disassociate them from the report, describing it as  “less than credible”.

 JOHESU had noted: “In one of the most nauseating recommendations of the Yayale Ahmed Presidential Committee of Experts on Professional Relationships in the Public Health Sector (YAPCEPRPH), it recommended the establishment of an unnecessary office of Chief Medical Adviser to Mr. President. A perusal of the functions of this office including “exercising essential responsibilities for issues as ‘smoking and health’ as well as issuing warning to the public on health hazards, advising the president on emergent public health issues confirms that this recommendation is only a short-cut to bringing back to life the concept of Surgeon-General as demanded by the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA).