In a chilling and scary message to its members, the Joint Health Staff Unions (JOHESU) has declared its determination to make everyone, including doctors, crawl on their knees and beg them for mercy to return to work. Other hospital staff, besides doctors, began a nationwide strike today.
The message, sent to Everyday.ng by a medical doctor, reads: “All management staff need to be involved in this important strike.
“No director should go to work.
“Shut down the system completely.
“The doctors salary must suffer during the strike as well. Nothing should be prepared and sent by the accounts department.
“Let the doctors feel the pains. No skeletal work of any form. No attendance to covid-19 patients. Let their Almighty doctors do everything.
“All the offices be locked including the accounts (Patient should be unable to make any payments), all medical records library and offices be locked. The central stores closed. Pharmacy closed. Toilets closed. Generator houses closed. Shut down the system.
“Let them cry for mercy!
“Let the health sector get liberation for once”.
A medical consultant expressed dismay that though JOHESU members were free to fight for their rights, “but to make it look like their battle is against doctors is strange”.
He adds: “We used to be able to spread ourselves to help out with patients, but they want to make that impossible. If you are on strike, just withdraw from the hospital. You can’t lock up support services and police the act, putting the lives of those not on strike at risk. Since your services are important, just walk away and that will prove your point”.
Another source, however, explained that the grouse of JOHESU, and indeed all other hospital staff and stakeholders, “is the arrogance with which doctors carry on as if without them, nothing happens in the hospitals. While they are a core and very important aspect of the health delivery system; in Nigeria, they behave as if it is not a symbiosis. That is the basis for that viral message among medical workers you saw.”