In line with Nigeria’s effort to improve healthcare delivery, the Federal Government has set up a committee to look into the issue of accumulated waiver requests for employment of health workers in various hospitals across the country.
Director (information) of the Federal Ministry of Health and Social Welfare, Patricia Deworitshe announced the development in a statement issued on Friday, February 2, 2024.
According to her, the Minister of State for Health, Dr. Tunji Alausa made this known when he paid a familiarisation visit to the University College Hospital (UCH) Ibadan, Oyo State as part of his ongoing over-sight function visits to assess Federal Government owned health institutions in the country.
Alausa informed that with the challenge of shortage of human resources for health faced in the country, President Bola Tinubu, in his magnanimity saw the need for the process of waivers to recruit healthcare workers to be more streamlined and simplified hence the approval of the issuance of waivers request for hospitals was now domiciled at the Federal Ministry of Health.
“This is due to some bottlenecks faced by our Chief Medical and Medical Directors in the process of getting waiver approvals. We reached out to the Head of Service of the Federation, (HOSF) Dr. Yemi Esan, who has been on top, working judiciously to get these approvals, but we just all decided that it will be easier if the waiver process starts from the Ministry. So going forward from January, we are setting up a waiver committee at the Ministry that will promptly review and address all waiver requests from all our hospitals”, he said.
Alausa, who assured of accountability and transparency in the process said, “each hospital would generate a request for the number of staff needed to the Ministry, which will then go to the HOSF for some checks and balances under the establishment law, to see what is budgeted for the year. Once the Ministry confirms that everything is verified, approval for the waiver will be sent to the Budget office where the funds will be made available, there won’t be delays anymore”, the Minister stated.
Speaking further, the Minister commended UCH for the various feat achieved in healthcare delivery, especially in the area of training but said there was a need to train more to meet our future needs.
“Today our lifestyle has changed, the kind of diseases we didn’t have fifty years ago we have them now, with different kinds of cardiovascular diseases, we need cardiac strengthening and other forms of cardiac interventions. There is a need to start training more specialists in the area of interventional cardiology, electrophysiology, surgical oncology, and interventional radiology to meet the needs of the present-day health sector.”
Dr. Alausa, promised to look into challenges highlighted by the College, especially in the area of power, he advised the hospital to look into other alternative power supply sources like solar while the government will not rest on its oars in mobilising more funding to strengthen and address the issues affecting the hospital and the health sector.
