The group expressed great displeasure over the exclusion of Graduates of Bachelor of Nursing Science (B.N.Sc) degree from internship training of the Ministry of health, which accommodates University Graduates of other core healthcare professions.
The national President of the Association Chief (Hon) Solomon E. Egwuenu, stated this on Friday during the 2015 professional conference of the Association in Abakaliki, Ebonyi state.
Egwuenu, who spoke through the national secretary, Nurse G.I. Nshi, said it was disheartening and demoralizing to single out only nurses for exclusion in a scheme approved as mandatory by the National Universities Commission (NUC) for the baccalaureate training of core healthcare professionals.
He said, “the sole major import of the internship training is to blend the more theoretically skewed University education with comprehensive clinical expertise for enhanced performance and qualitative client care while the accessory import is monetary incentive during the training and decent placement upon employment in the civil service post-NYSC (National Youth Service Corps) after the training”.
He argued that it defied logic for nurses to be the only professionals left out of the scheme where as mounting evidence underscores that they need the internship training more than any other member of the health team since they stay closer and longer with patients round the clock.
“If not for a possible sinister plot to exclude nurses from the pecuniary rewards of the internship training, what other reason could it be for robbing Nigerians of qualitative clinical services they stand to gain if nurses that stay with and by them in times of health and illness, from birth till death, are trained in the scheme?
“This is especially as graduates of B.N.Sc degree are aberrantly placed on CONHESS 07 post-NYSC whereas their counterparts in other core healthcare professions such as Pharmacy, Physiotherapy, Medicine, Medical Laboratory Science and so on are placed on at least CONHESS 09 post-NYSC.
“Even more disturbing is the unjustifiable withdrawal of teaching allowance, payable to healthcare professionals in teaching hospitals, from these nurses that are already under placed and shortchanged without meting out such ill treatment to their counterparts in other core healthcare professions.
“What else can be a better definition of injustice than deliberately making two equal things unequal? In which other sector are university graduates treated as unequal other than the ministry of health?”
Egwuenu appealed to the federal government to address what he described as deliberate injustice against the members of the nursing profession, especially the exclusion from the internship training , which he said is the major reason for excessive medical tourism by Nigerians to other countries and lack of industrial harmony in the health sector.
He called on nurses to always maintain decorum, professionalism and altruistic patriotism for which they are known in the face of obvious, deliberate and unwarranted provocations by putting their patients foremost and above any other thing.
The UGONSA helmsman equally declared support for the anti-corruption war of President Muhammadu Buhari, arguing that those responsible for the woes of the country should be brought to book.
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