Preamble: The University Graduates of Nursing Science Association, UGONSA, popularly known as the Graduate Nurses Association of Nigeria (GNAN) brings you and the entire senate a superlative nightingale’s greetings. We wish to commend the senate under your leadership for the prompt and positive attention it has been giving to public petitions. We also commend the senate for its purposeful screening of the ministerial nominees, which in our understanding has signposted to the now sworn-in ministers that a new era, in which we are poised to get it right, has come and Nigerians are going to hold them accountable and responsible for our success or failure through our legislators. For now all we can assert about the 8thsenate is that it has so far done its task well above average. We therefore commend you for diligently leading the senate to perform at a level that has reposed in us the confidence that the people we elected to represent us and our interest in the red chamber are doing the work we elected them to do despite that you have not had it rosy since your election as President of the Senate.
2. We, the Nigerian Nurses, cannot bear the brunt of the age-long injustice against our profession any longer! Our hearts are full and very heavy. We have cried out our eyes and the tears in our lacrimals are fast drying up. We cannot bear it anymore. Our predicament has so devastated us that we now lack the energy to carry on if the grip of our tight yoke is not timely loosened. This cry for help needs your urgent attention sir because a lot of things have gone wrong, and if your kind intervention is delayed more would still go awry and the consequence for the entire nation would be a preventable precarious situation we shall all regret. To us sir, you and the entire 8thsenate are a knight in shining armour.
3. Sir, it is very unfortunate and regrettable that Nurses are the most visible healthcare professionals in the hospital setting yet the most marginalized in Nigeria’s health system. Over the years the profession of nursing science has received less attention from the authorities and policy makers in our country and the result has been a complete stagnation of the profession and a resultant underperformance of our healthcare delivery system as evidenced by the geometric rise in medical tourism to hospitals abroad over the years.
4. As at date, sir, nursing science is the only profession among the core healthcare professions whose University Graduates are aberrantly under placed on CONHESS 07 grade level after the National youth service corps (NYSC) schemes whereas others are properly placed on at least CONHESS 09 post-NYSC.Despite the provision of the Industrial Arbitration Panel (IAP) Award, 1981 (herein attached as Annexure A) that the profession of Nursing is on parity with that of Pharmacy in Nigeria, as is obtainable in Great Britain, what we see in practice is an aberrant situation where the University Graduates of Nursing are appointed directly on CONHESS 07 post-NYSC while their counterparts in Pharmacy are appointed on CONHESS 09 despite both having identical entry requirements and course duration for the first degree in the University. Pharmacy interns for example, are even appointed on CONHESS 08 pre- NYSC, a grade higher than CONHESS 07, which University Graduates of Nursing are appointed to post-NYSC. Apart from Pharmacy, the University Graduates of other healthcare professions such as Medicine, dentistry, Optometry, Physiotherapy, Medical Laboratory Science, and so on, enjoy at least CONHESS 09 post- NYSC except their nursing counterparts, who are unjustifiably buried on CONHESS 07.
5. Sir, we have challenged the ‘powers-that-be’ in the health sector, including the office of the honourable minister of health to expound on the rationale for such aberration but none till date has adduced any scintilla of reason for such a leaching and monumental injustice yet they carry on as though nothing is at stake with no visible effort to rectify the anomaly.

6. Sir, our heart bleeds in pain as we wish to humbly inform you that the profession of nursing science is also the only core healthcare profession whose University Graduates do not participate in the mandatory one year internship training approved for University Graduates of core healthcare disciplines and designed to blend the more theoretically skewed University education with comprehensive clinical expertise for enhanced performance and qualitative client care. This persists even as mounting evidence underscores that nurses need the internship training more than other members of the health team since they stay longer and closer with patients, care for them and as well monitor them round-the- clock.
7. One dicey misconception we have always strived to correct is the unintelligible insinuation that one becomes a super nurse by just bagging a degree in nursing. There is no reason to consider a fresh Graduate Nurse a “super nurse” than to consider a young Medical Doctor (House Officer) a “super doctor”. Therefore, the internship training is paramount to baccalaureate programme of nursing as it is to those of other healthcare disciplines since we are all products of the same theoretically skewed Nigerian Universities and most importantly because nurses are universally entrusted with people’s lives. Those that are entrusted with people’s lives must be adequately trained and competent to discharge their responsibilities efficiently and effectively.
8. That the Federal Government has implemented the NUC approved mandatory internship training for the University Graduates of other health professions such as Pharmacy, Medicine and Surgery, Dentistry, Optometry, Medical Laboratory Science, Physiotherapy and so on while that of Nurses has been treated as trivial and non-mandatory despite the formidable niche we occupy in care delivery, as well as our selfless sacrifice and commitment to improved client care, is a pointer that our contributions in the Nigerian health system are either under rated or not in any way appreciated, or both. If not, it may simply imply that some people are deliberately manipulating our health system to run at a level of underperformance ostensibly to promote medical tourism, one of the avenues through which our collective patrimony is siphoned, by denying the caregivers the opportunity of being properly and adequately trained to discharge their responsibilities effectively as is the case with the paradoxical exclusion of nurses from internship training.
9. If the healthcare team is likened to a football team, we would say that the nurse is the goal keeper of the team. A team where the goal keeper is underprepared or not adequately trained remains a bad team because despite the efforts of other team mates in scoring goals and securing their post against the opponent, the team would always concede goals which an adequately trained goal keeper would ordinarily stop. And the fact remains that the success or failure of any team is rightly attributed to the team and not any individual player. This is why equal treatment and motivation in training and remuneration is availed the entirety of players in the team. Exclusion of Nurses from internship training that accommodates other members of the healthcare team is the major factor responsible for the underperformance of our healthcare team with the ugly result of escalation of medical tourism to foreign hospitals as a result of gross loss of Nigerians’ confidence in our own health system. When the healthcare team fails, it can therefore be simply put that the Physicians, the surgeons, the Nurses, the Pharmacists, the Medical Laboratory Scientists, the Physiotherapists, the Optometrists, and so on, have all failed the system. This precarious situation will remain unabated until we do the needful by ensuring that nurses who are entrusted with people’s lives are adequately trained to be able to carry out their responsibilities efficiently and effectively.