The five-day warning strike of doctors under the aegis of the National Association of Resident Doctors, which started on Wednesday, recorded full compliance in Bayelsa State as its members working at the Federal Medical Centre, Yenagoa and the Niger Delta University Teaching Hospital, Okolobiri stayed away from their duty posts.
The President of NARD at the FMC, Yenagoa, Dr Romeo Mbooh, and President of the state-owned NDUTH, Dr Remember Namara, disclosed this in separate interviews with our correspondent on Wednesday.
They said their members were actively participating in the warning strike in compliance with the directive of the national body.
Our correspondent gathered that only consultants and nurses were rendering skeletal medical services in some departments and wards at the two health facilities.
Namara said, “We are fully in compliance with the strike, yes we are fully in compliance.”
On his part, Mbooh said, “The strike in FMC Yenagoa is total. It is just that consultants are attending to patients. If consultants were part of the strike it would have been much more total. But even though consultants are seeing patients, at the level of NARD, it is total.
“We have done a lot of monitoring, we’ve gone round departments and we saw a lot of our colleagues handing over patients; discharging patients because sometimes, consultants may not be around and they (resident doctors) need to quickly discharge those patients, and possibly referral so that they will not have a lot of morbidities. So in the bid of doing that, you can say that there is 90 per cent compliance with the strike.”
He described the warning strike as unfortunate, stressing that “ordinarily it ought not to have occurred if it is a system where things are working.”
