Dear nigerians!

Whosoever doesn't know that the health sector is a joke is obviously not a nigerian.

✓Frustrated and striking, overwhelmed health staff.
✓Inadequate medical facilities
✓Poor health insurance schemes hence people have to pay out of their pocket.
✓Brain drain

Tomorrow, resident doctors are going on a nationwide strike AGAIN.

This is what it means.

Resident doctors are doctors who are under a residency program where they STUDY and WORK to become a consultant in a specialized area of medicine for a period of 6+x years after medical school. They are usually found mostly in teaching hospitals/tetiary centers where residency programs are run. You can also find them in a few secondary centers if they run a residency program.

In Lagos State, we have 2 main tetiary centers, LUTH which is owned by the federal government, and LASUTH which is owned by lagos state. Tetiary centers are like that because they are the final bus stops for the ill. In theory, you're supposed to get the highest level of care there that secondary and primary health centers cannot handle. Resident doctors are the majority of the workforce (doctors) there.

What happens when resident doctors under the umbrella of NARD undergoes a strike?

For the average nigerian it's like this. Patients who usually frequent LUTH and LASUTH for their medical appointments will no longer be able to do so. Most of the patients already on admission will be discharged.

Those discharged patients whose sicknesses won't heal themselves with no where to go will flock specialist private hospitals if they can afford it, but most will find themselves in public secondary centers like general and military hospitals that referred them to the tetiary centers in the first place because they couldn't handle them.

Meanwhile more sick people will also troop into the same secondary facilities with no where else to go. Before long, the hospital becomes overwhelmed with patients, people begging for admission, but they will have to wait hours or even days before getting a bed space. Imagine a very ill person sitting and getting treatment on a chair, on a stretcher, on the floor, holding your drip because there are no drip stands or it being nailed to a wall. In no time, hospitals will start rejecting patients because due to lack of bed space even if it's an emergency. (All this happens on a normal day, but it increases tenfold during a strike)


The back log will even spill over into primary centers that have available doctors where the process will repeat itself the few available staff trying to see more than they can handle. It's like an epic spillover of the sick.

Then the average person that has 'malaria' but decided to treat it at the chemist but the treatment failed will join the whole fiasco.

This is why one will hear of cases of a sick person going from hospital to hospital and being rejected before giving up the ghost or taken to a traditional center/church/village to die.

So whose fault is it? The health workers, or your promise and fail government? Well fed dogs won't keep howling. HOLD YOUR GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABLE!!

This is coming from someone who has lost family and friends to death during different strike actions.

God help me to leave this Zoo

It is better to speak in the only language they understand

rotadeco27:
It is better to speak in the only language they understand

they are becoming deaf to it