Loses medics with the virtual speed of light, yet can’t replace them fast enough. Time to tweak the recruitment regulations

You just must feel for Professor Abiodun Otegbayo, chief medical director (CMD) of the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, Oyo State, on his double jeopardy at managing Nigeria’s pioneer university teaching hospital. The hospital marked its 65th Founder’s Day on November 21, for which the CMD briefed the media.

“Every week, I signed resignation letters of 15 health workers at the institution,” he rued, “who are mostly clinicians: that is, nurses, doctors and pharmacists, among others.”

The grim statistics, from the heavy clinical manpower haemorrhage: between 2020 and October 15, 2022, the tertiary medical facility, which caters for patients well beyond Nigeria’s shores, drawing medical tourists from Nigeria’s West African neighbours, lost no less than 600 medics and clinical support staff — the virtual fighting tooth of the hospital’s army.

But that is only one leg of the CMD’s splitting headache. The other leg is that he cannot bridge this manpower gap, caused by push-and-pull market dynamics, poor worker welfare that seems to make UCH compete less and, of course, a current societal crisis as insecurity.

He cannot replace lost staff, even if there is no shortage of applicants, experienced and fresh, across the whole gamut of the hospital’s clinical staff needs, because of bureaucratic bottlenecks which slow down the recruitment process. Inasmuch as these processes were put in place as checks and balances to maintain the integrity of recruitment, it’s high time these processes were tweaked to respond to the urgent demands of the time.

Tweaking does not mean removing all checks and balances. Indeed, that’s the whole essence of bureaucracy: a set of rules, adopted over a period of time that imposes calm and stability on government hire-and-fire, without subjecting such to individual whims.

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