By Daniel Ayantoye
The West African College of Surgeons (WACS) has called on the Federal Government to improve health care facilities in rural communities for qualitative health care service delivery in the country.
It also charged government to key into its middle level training programme ‘Membership’ by releasing the ‘Career Structure for the country for an increased manpower in the health sector.
This charge was given by the President of WACS, Prof. King-David Terna Yaw, while speaking to Pilot Health on the sideline of the 2017 Integrated Clinical Revision Course in Surgery in Ilorin on Saturday.
He stressed that the training of resident doctors is targeted at improving surgical services in West African countries.
“Federal Government can assist by providing facilities so that services will be scaled up, because our curriculum design now is such that trainees must spend time in rural areas and this will be more useful in increasing the level of health care delivery.
“In fact, we have introduced a middle level training programme which we call membership and other governments like Ghana, Liberia among others in West Africa have already designed a career structure and if government of Nigeria will release its career structure for the ‘membership’, you will find out that it will generate enough man-power that will bring treatment to grassroots,” he added.
While commending the facilities in place in the state, Yawe stated that there can only be efficient and productive health workers when there are standard health facilities.
Speaking on the training, the Chairman of WACS, Ezeome Emmanuel, disclosed that the state gained hosting right because it has state-of-the-arts facilities, which culminated in its success.
“We have the Objective Structure and Clinical examination, which is novel. We have seized the opportunity of the training to make use of the high quality Exam Centre at the University of Ilorin,” he ethused.
Some of the participants who spoke to our reporter expressed appreciation to facilitators of the two-week training programme.
Dr. Amina Japhet of the Benue State University said, “the training has really helped us particularly the revision course. It has exposed us to new trend in pathology management.”
In the same vein, Dr. Garba Sani of Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, who also commended coordinators of the programme, urged them to ensure improvement in the transportation and feeding in subsequent programmes.
