NARD laments unpaid 1,600 resident doctors’ training fund

No fewer than 1,600 members of the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors from over 30 health facilities in the country are yet to be paid their Medical Residency Training Fund since 2020, Sunday PUNCH reports.

This is even as NARD warned that it might take a drastic action if nothing was done by the Federal Government to pay the doctors the MRTF and address its other demands.

The association had last year asked the government to pay the 2020 MRTF to members who were yet to be paid and to review the Consolidated Medical Salary Structure, among others.

The medical residency training is a postgraduate specialist training for medical practitioners and dental surgeons to be certified as specialists in a specialised branch of medicine or dentistry.

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The MRTF is the fund paid to resident doctors by the Federal Government through the Integrated Payroll and Personnel information system for the purpose of the training programme.

Speaking in an interview with our correspondent, NARD President, Dr Emeka Orji, said the association would write government regarding its growing concerns.

“For 2020, we have over 1,600 resident doctors who have not been paid the MRTF. You can see it’s a large number of people from 30 centres involved.

“We are going to have our January National Emergency Council meeting in Uyo in less than three weeks. In fact, we are preparing to write to the government to notify them of this growing agitation.

“Remember, there was an ultimatum last year which has elapsed. People should not be surprised if we end that meeting in Uyo with something drastic, so we need to call the attention of the government and see how they can address them before that meeting.

“We have done everything that we have been asked to do and provided everything that we were asked to provide and up till now, I think the Federal Ministry of Health and the Federal Ministry of Finance have not come to an agreement of what is required before the doctors who were omitted in 2020 would be paid.

“We just see it as a delay tactics; we have done the leg work, trying to convince them but there is a limit to what the national officers can do. We are only worried that this is a very critical time in this country to shut down health services and that is why we are going to draw the attention of the government to it this week, hoping that they see the danger and try to address these things.”

Speaking further, Orji said the association was not aware of any plan by the government to review doctors’ salaries.

“The government has agreed to set up a committee for the review of CONMESS but as it is, NARD is not aware whether the committee has been set up or it is meeting. As far as we are concerned as an association, we have not seen any movement on the part of the government to accede to that demand because we have not been called to any meeting about that.”

Efforts to reach the Deputy Director/Head, Media and Publicity of the Federal Ministry of Health, Ahmadu Chindaya, for comments proved abortive.

He did not take his calls and had yet to respond to a text message sent to him as of press time.