Nurses from the National Association of Nigeria Nurses and Midwives, NANNM, have protested against the management of the Federal Medical Centre in Idi Aba, Abeokuta, Ogun State, over what they describe as deplorable working conditions.
During their protest on Wednesday, the health professionals claimed that their members had collapsed on duty owing to job overload and an unfavorable work environment.
The nurses protested a paucity of staff and an apparent exclusion from the institution’s 2023 advancement.
During their peaceful parade on the hospital grounds, they insisted that if nothing was done to ease their many pains, harsher actions would be implemented.
The agitated employees sang solidarity songs while holding placards with messages such as “Stop Selective Promotion,” “Nurses Workload is Enough for Promotion,” and “Nurses’ Lives Matter,” among others.
According to Platinum Times, the National President of NANNM, Michael Nnachi, recently lamented the loss of over 75,000 of their members to the outside world as a result of low salaries and an unsanitary working environment in the country.
Olufimilola Adekunle, head of the FMC Abeokuta chapter of NANNM, spoke on behalf of the demonstrators, claiming that more than 200 nurses at the hospital had fled abroad.
She went on to say that there are only about 300 nurses remaining in the hospital to care for the hundreds of patients who come in every day.
Adekunle noted that the nurses are fatigued and overworked as a result of the hospital’s significant labor shortfall.
“It is really tough to survive; we had to collapse three units together. We are going to merge some wards together; that is what we are planning to do immediately after this protest because we cannot bear it any longer.
“We want the government to come to our aid; we are working and we need to be paid for what we do. All our rights should be given to us. Our next action is to down tools. We are going to write them and stop working because, in the past months, we have seen our nurses collapsing.
“In the past two months, we lost two nurses. Our lives are important. The workload contributed to the deaths and our nurses collapsing on duty. The only thing we enjoy from the management is this promotion; we don’t benefit from them,” she said.
Reacting to the protest, the Head of Clinical Services of the hospital, Dr Kunle Adediran, told DAILY POST that the issue regarding the promotion was beyond the management. The promotion of nurses, he said, is dependent on the dictates of the Federal Ministry of Health.
He, however, promised that the hospital would write to the Federal Government about developments at the hospital.
“We are all employees of the Federal Government and all that we do has to be done in compliance with the directives of the government. It is not entirely up to the management,” he said.