Association Urge Federal Govt To Deal With Rot In Medical Practice

The Association of Community Pharmacists of Nigeria (ACPN) has appealed to the federal government to sanitise the country’s medical practice.

Making the call in a press statement jointly signed by the National Chairman Adewale Oladigbolu and National Secretary, Ambrose Ezeh the association described as hypocritical, a recent statement credited to the Registrar of the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria, MDCN, Dr. Tajudeen Sanusi, calling on regulatory bodies in Health to wake-up to their responsibility of regulating, monitoring, evaluating and punishing the behaviours of their erring members.

Citing Dr. Sanusi’s prescription of disciplinary actions against Medical Officers caught “toying with the lives of their patients by being negligent, corrupt and in some cases, showing gross incompetence while managing their patients,”  they said the MDCN was guilty of ineptitude in enforcing discipline on its erring members.

Over 99 per cent of the private hospitals run unregistered pharmacies with no pharmacist to supervise dispensing and counselling of drug-related endeavours contrary to the Poison and Pharmacy Act. The exploitation of patients who sometimes pay over 500 per cent more than the baseline cost of drugs through trickster manoeuvres is one of the planks of survival by private Physicians in Nigeria.

Calling on the federal government to urgently address the anomalies, the duo  added that private hospitals in Nigeria are the centres of unrestricted and unchecked creation of sub-professional cadres in healthcare “because this is where auxiliary nurses, drug dispensing assistants and diagnostic assistants are trained and sometimes certified while the various Private Hospital Registration Authorities and the MDCN look away to protect their Physician brothers.”