ABUJA (Reuters) – Resident doctors in Nigerian public hospitals went on strike on Monday to demand better benefits as they battle the coronavirus pandemic in Africa’s most populous country, the union said.
Those treating COVID-19 patients will stay on the job but their union, the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD), gave the government two weeks to meet the demands or else they would also walk out.
Resident doctors are those who have graduated from medical school and are training as specialist consultants. They are pivotal to frontline healthcare in Nigeria as they dominate the emergency wards in its hospitals.
Strikes are common in Nigeria’s public health system, with clinicians frequently seeking pay rises and improvements to under-funded infrastructure to meet the rising burden of healthcare in the West African nation of 200 million people.
“If the government fails to meet our minimum demands within two weeks, the resident doctors working in (COVID-19) isolation centers will automatically join the strike,” Aliyu Sokomba, the head of the union, said in a statement.
The resident doctors are seeking a COVID-19 pay supplement in addition to life insurance for doctors and more funds in the federal budget for their training, among other demands.
NARD has complained about inadequate protective equipment to treat COVID-19 patients and has said that 10 doctors have died so far from the highly infectious respiratory disease.
Nigeria has had more than 16,000 confirmed cases of the virus and 420 deaths. Most of the cases have been in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest city with some 20 million inhabitants.
Last month, doctors in Lagos staged a one-day strike over what they described as police harassment of health workers trying to move through the city to treat patients during a coronavirus curfew.
(Reporting by Afolabi Sotunde and Angela Ukomadu in Lagos; Writing by Chijioke Ohuocha; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
