IN RETROSPECT OCTOBER 2015: ALUTA FOR INTERNSHIP

AGITATION FROM 2015 NATIONAL PROFESSIONAL CONFERENCE TAGGED " INTERNSHIP SUMMIT " IN HELDD IN ABAKALIKI EBONYI STATE, NIGERIA.

NURSES PETITION BUHARI OVER WORKING CONDITIONS (Date of original publication- 11/10/2015).

The age long struggle by Nurses to improve their working conditions at the weekend in Abakaliki, the Ebonyi State capital received a boost when Nurses under the aegis of University Graduates of Nursing Science Association (UGONSA) unanimously and strongly condemned their exclusion from internship scheme of the ministry of health that accommodates the university graduates of other healthcare profession as well as their aberrant under placement on CONHESS 07(Grade Level  08) post-NYSC (National Youth Service corps) in the civil service of the federation while their counterparts in other healthcare disciplines are placed on at least CONHESS 09 (Grade Level 10) Post-NYSC.

In calming the fraying nerves at the 2015 National professional conference of UGONSA, an All progressive Congress (APC) stalwart, Comrade Chinedu Ogah, OON, AOJ, who flagged off the event promised to bring these obvious inequality to the notice of President Muhammadu Buhari, GCFR. The APC stalwart assured the nurses that Mr President he knows is not given to corruption, injustice, cheating and unwarranted inequality.

While citing instance of how president Buhari has immediately after assumption of office called for the payment of all outstanding allowances of workers, re-assured the nurses that their genuine presentations will receive attention before the president who he said belong to everybody, including the nurses.

In his speech, the national secretary of UGONSA, popularly known as Graduate Nurses Association of Nigeria (GNAN),Nurse Goodluck I. Nshi, who stood in for the national President of the association, Chief(Hon). Solomon E.O. Egwuenu, lamented that the exclusion of nurses from the internship scheme has adverse consequence on client-care adding that the exclusion robs nurses of the opportunity of acquiring comprehensive clinical skills needful for optimum performance.

He explained that the internship is meant to blend the more theoretically skewed University education with comprehensive clinical expertise for enhanced performance and qualitative client care, arguing that it defied logic for nurses to be the only core healthcare 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 longer and closer with patients, care for them and as well monitor them round-the-clock.

He also lamented 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.

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.