THE Chief Medical Director (CMD), University College Hospital (UCH), Prof. Temitope Alonge, has insisted that the skipping allowance being demanded by the striking resident doctors of the hospital was not included in the 2014 budget.
Only the National Salary and Wages Commissioný (NSWC), he says, can address the issue.
The CMD, who stated this over the weekend while commissioning a new mobile blood bank in the hospital, also denied that hospital has doctors with casual status in its employ.
Alonge said that some of the issues raised by the striking doctors were internal matters which had been resolved, adding that the issue of salaries and wages that are due to workers is not the prerogative of the ministries.
He said: “Funding for the hospital is coming directly from the Federal Government and when you prepare the budget, it captures specific part of personnel cost, but the issue of skipping does not exist in the calender of the Federal Ministry of Health.
“When we had a meeting with the resident doctors on Monday and we explained to them that the budget of 2014 which was approved in 2015 only has the issue of the correction of anomalies of core duties called relativity, the issue of Skipping was not captured. It is the prerogative of the National Salary and Wages Commission. Also, the issue of employment is resident in the Head of Service and what the resident doctors presented to us was a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).
“A letter is just intent and does not carry much weight as an MOU. The next one is a circular, which is something that has been agreed upon and has received the backing of government. What we got from the resident doctors was an MOU and not a circular from the commission.
But in a swift reaction, the President of the Resident Doctors, Dr. Lukman Ogunjimi, ýdescribed the claim of the CMD as untrue, stressing that it was a circular that was issued by the Head of Service of the Federation which he has seen.
Ogunjimi said at their last meeting with the CMD, the association showed him a circular and not a MOU in the presence of eminent scholars in the profession.
“We showed him a circular from the Head of Service of the federation and Ministry of Health, before we now showed him a MOU that was signed by the Delta State Governor, ýSecretary to the Government of the Federation, Chairman, Salaries and Wages Commission, the Director of Budget, the Chairman, House Committee on Health.
“It is sad, worrisome and pathetic that the CMD can describe our claims as untrue.“
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