STATES SHOULD PAY DOCTORS' NEW SALARY — NMA

The Chairman of the Nigerian Medical Association, Kogi State Chapter, Dr Joseph Iduh, has called on state governments that have not implemented the new salary structure to do so without further delay.

He was referring to the Consolidated Medical Salary Structure and the Consolidated Health Salary Structure being paid by the Federal Government to its medical doctors.

Some states have implemented the new salary scheme, resulting in strikes or impending strikes, the News Agency of Nigeria reports.

Iduh said qualified doctors were moving to areas where they could get better pay, noting that the trend had encouraged rural-urban drift.

'The NMA's position is that all the doctors should be well paid. A doctor in a village, should be paid as a doctor in Abuja, these are all the things that we are asking for,' Iduh said.

He claimed that though money had been allocated to pay doctors, the state government were hesitant.

'They would prefer to do other things with this money, now there are no roads, no good hospitals, their health facilities are decadent and the doctors who are managing these hospitals are not even running them properly, because of the poor remuneration,' he said.

According to Iduh, medical doctors in some states are on strike, while the NMA intervention has been of no consequence.

'If the doctors are paid equally, when a doctor retires from the city, he can go back to his village and still earn the same salary and attend to the people in the village.

'Because the doctors are migrating from the rural areas to the urban areas, we see that the population of our people in the village is dying due to lack of medical care.

'Poor remuneration means that areas without doctors who can detect the warning signs easily get overrun by things like the recent cholera outbreak and so many other diseases.'