The Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria, (MDCN) has advised graduate medical doctors in the country not to travel abroad without a purpose and target for it.
The Registrar of the council, Dr Tajudeen Sanusi who gave the advice said such will guarantee training of more medical medical practitioners and the empowerment of those in the profession.
He spoke while performing the induction ceremony of 123 graduating students of the College of Medicine , Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti (ABUAD).
Sanusi who stated that the desire of MDCN is to have autonomous Colleges of Medicine in Nigeria to eradicate delayed graduation of medical students admonished the graduands to make ethics of the profession their watchwords.
He said, “There is this trend now, called Japa, I want advise you, there is nothing over there, the truth home is home, after completing your training here in Nigeria, the idea of the proverbial seeking greener pastures abroad is not it, most of our colleagues over there are itching to come back home and some of them felt they should have been back after completing their post graduate training. So I will advice that if you must go have a target, return home on completion of your post graduate training. If your trainers decided to leave and not come back, who will train you?
“We must guarantee the continuous training of doctors and other health workers in the country. You can go to Europe to get the best of additional training and come back home .
The Founder and Chancellor of the university , Aare Afe Babalola (SAN) urged the Medical & Dental Council of Nigeria MDCN to increase student admission quota for the institution’s College of Medicine.
“In anticipation of the coming Accreditation Exercise, we have put up modern structures which can accommodate over 360 new students”.
Sanusi noted that the council made some adjustments with some schools spending between 10 and 13 years to graduate their first sets of medical students which bacame an embarrassment to the system.
“It was one of the reasons why some parents send their children abroad to study . The adjustment put more pressure on the institutions and I am happy ABUAD was able to cope, its first set didn’t spend more than 6-7 years before graduating. Some 9 universities also had their graduations”.
He explained that in the established public universities, days of students are being elongated because of incessant ASUU strikes.
“MDCN is still looking inwards as to what to do to arrest the situation so that the medical students are not unnecessarily delayed for too long before graduating.
“By the guidelines of MDCN, it is expected that every university wanting to run degree in medicine or dentistry to operate a College and the it must be an autonomous college.
” In the last 3 or 4 years in Nigeria, many university of medical sciences are being established. It is simply because of the realization of the fact that, running a College is like running a university within the university and Teaching Hospital is for the skill acquisition, which must provide services to the public. It is in the process of the service provision that the students acquired their skills and that is why MDCN continues to insist on this collegiate system.”
For effective communication between patients and doctors, he revealed that the MDCN has written National Universities Commission on the need to incorporate French and sign languages into medical studies curriculum.
The MDCN boss also warned the young doctors against joining any industrial action while on their mandatory one year housemanship.
“As house officers, you are not expected to embark on strike because the one year housemanship is structured in such a way that it has to be 12 uninterrupted weeks in each of the postings and once it is interrupted and you have to repeat it, without pay.”
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